Director’s Note
“In the night, a thick tangled root had
grown from the boy’s navel, and a
tough fleshy root had grown from
the girl’s navel, and these roots were
connected to their mother’s navel,
rooting the three of them together.
They tried to cut the roots. But they
could not.”
Sitting on a shelf in The British Library is an
unassuming red book. Indispensable to
folklorists all over the world, the Aarne Index
has categorised and numbered thousands of
folktale types. From men outwitting the devil
to tales of foolish wives, from tricksters to
magic animals and tales of stupid husbands,
the list goes on. The idea for roots began with
this book. I was researching folktales, with
the aim of finding some stories to stage. The
Aarne Index is a treasure trove as a theatre
maker, filled to the brim with great ideas, very
silly ideas, and very, very weird ideas. I would
pick a category in the book, for example
‘Transformations’ under which would be titles
such as Man turns in to melon seed, Woman
turns into pestle and mortar and then, based
on the title, or on a two-line description of this
type of tale, I would write a short terse story.
I attempted to stick to the original format
of these tales as I had read them in Angela
Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales. They were free of
florid language, blunt, odd and very appealing
to the 1927 sensibility. I rather liked the idea
of not moralising with these stories and had to
fight my own instincts to right the wrongs of
these tales, to tame them. Rewriting history is
very dangerous, perhaps not only in fact but
also in fiction. After writing the tales I would
read them aloud, often to a liquor-imbued
crowd of friends and family and see how they
reacted. Esme and Paul of 1927 would listen
to them and try to visualise how to stage
them, if they liked the tale it went into a pile of