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Fox Tales

Fox Tales: Pied Piper of Hamelin

Surgeons Hall 5 - 20th August

Join Reynard the Fox, Gripp the Raven and their friend Hans the Story teller to hear their version of Hans Christian Anderson’s classic story about greed, rats and biscuits (well we added the biscuits!) Reynard, Gripp and Hans take on all the characters in this fun story and families love their chaotic antics as they confusingly stumble through the tale, adding their own flourishes and jokes at every turn. Reynard and Gripp are more interested in biscuits and sugar mice than Han’s story, but he doesn’t give up and by the end of the show the audience and his friends have all had a side splittingly fun time.

Can you tell me a little about the inspiration for your show?

Fox Tale: The Pied Piper is the latest in a series of storytelling pieces we have developed specifically to bring some of those classic tales to new audiences. As a group we remember those stories really well but were conscious that they are not always told these days and that many of them may not appeal in their traditional form.

So, we decided to liven them up with a story telling show which features our friends Reynard the Fox and Gripp the Raven, two anarchic, silly and often confused, friends who like to hear stories from their friend Hans the Storyteller.

What role you puppets play in the production, and why did you decide to use them?

The two puppets of Reynard and Gripp are central to our production, We offer a family show which is based around story telling and the puppets represent two key roles. Firstly they are the audience. With their innocence and silliness they represent many of the questions and thoughts that may be going on in the heads of the children watching. Unlike those usually polite young people, our puppets have the freedom to say and do all the silly things. This really helps to produce quick and strong rapport with our audience and grows the sense of community between those of us on stage and the children watching. But we also use the puppets as our actors - working alongside Hans the human character, the two puppets take on different roles and give voice to different characters during the piece allowing us to deliver larger scale productions.

Is this work typical of your productions, and do you have a particular dramaturgical approach  to making theatre?

The Pied Piper is the latest in a short season of classic tales which very much represent our core output. As a not for profit social enterprise, Laughing Fox Productions bases all its artistic decisions within a context of community involvement.

We work predominantly in communities which suffer deprivation and may feel left behind, and we use our shows for a variety of themes including increasing literacy and building community cohesion. We also offer community workshops alongside our shows - most often around puppet making- and take our performances into special schools and other specialist settings.

And do you feel that the Fringe is a good place for your work? What are you hoping to experience?

We hope that the Fringe will be a great place for our work. Although the focus for the fringe will be less about the community purpose, we hope that the festival will give us the opportunity to make contacts and take  our work to larger audiences nationally. We have also been lucky enough to find some community groups locally where we will also be performing during the season.