Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty is in a heroin-induced coma on a Liverpool sink estate. She’s fallen off the rails. The youngest of seven kids, in a crowded Catholic household, she started shoplifting and carjacking as a teenager, before turning to drugs and destructive relationships.

Safe to say, we’re not in Disneyland any more. Colette Garrigan fuses her own chequered autobiography with the Brothers Grimm tale Briar Rose, the story that underlies both Sleeping Beauty and Maleficient. She overlays the two stories, so that fantasy and reality begin to blur. Her “deep, deep sleep” is much darker than that description lets on.

Current tastes dictate that we ought to keep an eye on our fairytales and, in particular, the ideals they implant in children’s minds; all perfect princesses and happy-ever-afters. Garrigan subverts that by making a case for the necessary escapism that these stories provide. There’s a sense that they allow children to dream and keep embers of hope glowing, no matter how grim the reality.

It’s enchantingly staged, with some nifty shadow puppetry created out of a lavish dinner table, complete with candlesticks and wine bottles. A wicker bread basket becomes Beauty’s cage under the stairs; a toast rack makes a palatial corridor. Logistics do get in the way, though, with momentum sagging as Garrigan tries to do everything singlehandedly, but she’s a charming storyteller with an intricate, heartfelt message to communicate.