‘potentials’. I hoped that a nice clean, clear-cut,
very cohesive theme would emerge from these
stories…
When Italo Calvino compiled his book,
Italian Folktales, he was searching for Italian
stories, when Carter compiled her book of
folktales, she limited herself to tales with a
female protagonist.
I hoped for something similar. But nothing of
the sort happened. We ended up with a rather
ragtag collection of folk jokes and stories that
we all liked… just because. These stories were
not character driven, not psychological, more
like one-liners, folk jokes, and yet they seemed
universal also, they could all be applied to
real world situations. They were matter of fact,
lacking a clear moral, and different to the folk
tales we grew up with, which, it became clear,
had been bleached and cleaned up, trimmed
and neatened, packed full of Christian morality,
gender stereotypes, and ‘defanged’ to quote
Carter, whose own anthology begins with an
Inuit tale about a woman who arm wrestles
men into submission. Oh, and then shows off
her huge clitoris.
We kept coming back to certain questions with
these stories, and they are still, for the most
part, unanswered.
What do the stories of our forbears tell us
about ourselves? What can we learn about how
to tell stories now, for future generations, from
such stories?
Underlying our exploration in to folktales was
our imminent departure from the EU, and
this couldn’t help but play into our thinking
about the show. We take our stories with us
wherever we go, stories migrate, and they
have no respect whatsoever for boundaries
and borders. What I found in the Aarne Index
was that there was no real link between a story
and where it was found. (The index tells you
beneath the tale where the tale was found, for
example, one story might have been found in
Lithuania, Ireland, Slovenia and Portugal.)