Unfolding drama: how Julia Donaldson's Paper Dolls took flight

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/apr/24/julia-donaldson-paper-dolls-book-little-angel-theatre

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Julia Donaldson was in the loo when she had the idea. “Malcolm has his medical journals there sometimes,” she explains. Malcolm, her husband and occasional guitarist-accompanist, is a doctor. “He sits there reading them. And one of these medical journals had a picture of some paper dolls on the front – it was about family medicine or something. It was probably a mother, a father and two children. But that image … I just thought, I’d love to do a story about paper dolls. What would happen? It was obvious that they’d be snipped up … It was one of the rare occasions when a whole story came to me very, very quickly.”

Related: The Paper Dolls review – puppet-powered Julia Donaldson adaptation

Instead of the usual “umpteen possible plot variations”, there emerged clearly the tale of a girl with tiger slippers and a butterfly hair clip who cuts out a string of five paper dolls with her mother. The dolls dance and sing around her bedroom and go on a journey through her toy farm, up to the table for elevenses, out into the garden and then – snip, snip! – off into the sky after they are chopped to pieces by a scissor-wielding boy who appears out of nowhere.

But the dolls’ spirit is irrepressible: “We’re not gone. Oh no no no! We’re holding hands and we won’t let go.” The pieces join together and the dolls float into the girl’s memory, which is imagined by the illustrator Rebecca Cobb in an image of heartfelt delicacy: a forest wrapped with bunting and filled with sunflowers, white mice, a cat-shaped birthday cake, a mobile of dangling stars – and a kind granny knitting beneath a tree.

Published in 2012, The Paper Dolls has become one of those picture books that are used to teach young children about loss. Donaldson says she never set out to write it with that intention although afterwards she thought it would be helpful for “families where a grandparent or a parent or even the cat has died – or you’ve lost something, like your teddy”. The book is also about what you pass on through the generations – not least the inherited passion for creativity. At the end of the story, the girl grows up into a mother who makes paper dolls with her own daughter.

So it is brilliantly fitting that the book is now being staged at Islington’s Little Angel, a family theatre in more ways than one. It was opened in 1961 by the puppeteer John Wright and his wife, Lyndie, after they took over an abandoned temperance hall and the cottage next door. John died in 1991 but Lyndie is still based at the theatre; she builds puppets in her corner of the workshop, under the gaze of children who peer in through the window from the street outside. The onlookers also include a theatre cat, Larry, and a dog, Kansas, who was brought back from the US by her son, the film-maker Joe Wright (Atonement, Pride and Prejudice), who worked at his parents’ theatre from a young age. (Joe’s wife, Anoushka Shankar, has her own artistic heritage – she is a sitarist like her late father, Ravi.)

Donaldson, sitting on a bench in the Little Angel’s homely foyer, with Larry prowling around in the background, fondly remembers her own introduction to the arts by her family. “I grew up not a million miles from here in a tall Victorian house – my granny lived on the top floor, my aunt and uncle lived below, and my mother and father and sister and me below them. I had all those influences. My grandmother would buy us Hans Christian Andersen fairy stories or Greek myths and things like that – I’ve still got all those books. My father gave me a book of 1,000 poems for my fifth birthday and I would learn them. My mother sang in a choir and would come back from Hampstead choral society singing The Creation or something; my father was chairman of Hampstead music club and we’d have musical evenings in the house … My gran used to read us limericks.”

From the beginning, music and storytelling were entwined for Donaldson. She met Malcolm at Bristol University and they began to go busking together. One by one, her humorous songs began to feature on children’s TV and one of those songs, A Squash and a Squeeze, became her first book in 1993. The rhymes in her books, like the chant of the paper dolls, really sing from the page. Does she speak them out loud as she’s working on a story? “Often when I’m writing something, especially when it’s in verse, I tend to give it to one of my nearest and dearest and get them to read it out loud. If anything doesn’t trip off the tongue, or if it’s not that obvious where you’re supposed to put the stress, I’ll probably go and rewrite that particular line.” After she wrote The Paper Dolls, Malcolm relished any chance to read it out. “Ages before we found an illustrator, at any moment he’d seize the opportunity and do it as a performance. He does it very low key …”

It took around four years to meet the right illustrator for the dolls. Cobb turned out to be what Malcolm calls “a clicker”, says Donaldson. They clicked: “She just got what the book was about.” Cobb’s drawings also opened up the imaginative world of the young girl in the story. On one page we see the dolls confronted by a toy dinosaur; on the next it’s grown to comically terrifying proportions in her fantasy world. On the following page the girl waves a tiger slipper at the dolls in her home; by the next the slipper has turned into a real, roaring tiger in the outdoors. “At the time I thought it was a bit sophisticated – that it would appeal to adults but perhaps children wouldn’t get it. Now I’ve completely come round to it.”

The beauty of Cobb’s characters is that they are both exquisitely, professionally executed yet also somehow seem like the work of a child (just look at their hair). The dolls, too, have clever names that both a bestselling author and a five-year-old child might dream up: they are “Ticky and Tacky and Jackie the Backie and Jim with two noses and Jo with the bow”. Donaldson says she knew she wanted the girl in the story “to name them and colour them in. It’s really difficult actually because paper dolls, when you snip them out, are identical. Although obviously you can colour them in differently. It was difficult to find the right illustrator because the dolls have got to have their own personality. They’ve got to not look identical, to look as if they’re made of paper.” Jim with two noses, she suggests, is the result of a slight slip in the scissoring. So what’s going on with Jackie the Backie, the doll who we see only from behind – where did she get that idea? “I was a bit naughty once in secondary school,” Donaldson laughs. “The German teacher was coming in. I was sitting facing the right way but I put my blazer on back to front. I had long hair and I brushed it all forward. And she said, ‘Julia, turn around!’ So I turned around and then I really did have my back to her. Maybe that came from that ...”

Wright, seated next to a rosy-cheeked puppet she has made for the story’s girl, says the theatre’s adaptation has kept quite closely to the illustrations “because it’s such a current book and people are so aware of it – those are the characters they know”. But she adds that “you can’t just put the page in the theatre, things have to change”. The set has been designed with a simple frame structure, “so it’s almost like the book page that they’re looking at. And then things kind of explode out of the page.” Most strikingly, a fabric garden is stretched out across the frame, with poppies and mice and a ladybird poking out among the tufts of grass. Wright worked on The Paper Dolls with her daughter, Sarah, who is in the process of setting up a puppet school. “She came in and built the puppets with me. She teaches me, too, which is lovely.”

Wright grew up in South Africa. “For some reason I started making puppets,” she remembers. “My mother’s oven was always full of papier-mache drying.” She met John when he came and did a puppet show in her town. “It was wartime so there were no shows at all. Once every two years a circus would come and that was so exciting. You’d spend the next two years dreaming about it.” When they set up the Little Angel in London, the aim was always to programme a mixture of shows for children and adults. “John always felt that he was performing for people who wanted to see puppet theatre. It wasn’t a children’s theatre in his eyes … He felt that the plays needed to be written in a way that the children reached up for them, rather than things given to them in a simple way. The parents sometimes felt the children wouldn’t understand but the children did.”

That approach is shared by The Paper Dolls’ director, Peter Glanville, former artistic director at the Little Angel and current artistic director of Polka theatre in Wimbledon, home to work that consistently respects and challenges its young audiences and often explores the complexities of family relationships – such as Sarah Argent’s wonderful Grandad, Me … and Teddy Too. The Paper Dolls is a co-production between Little Angel and Polka.

Glanville discovered the book when it was given to his daughter as a present. “She was at an age when she was just picking up objects all the time and transforming them into different characters and entering into her own imaginative play,” he says. “I thought the book captured that playfulness, the beauty and power and conviction that children have in the imaginative world they create. That’s something that’s lovely to explore theatrically as well – a verification of how they play.” He particularly liked the fact that “the mother is joining in. She seems to have a strong respect for the child’s imaginative play. She enters into the child’s story and responds to the story. That felt quite progressive in terms of the recognition of the importance of play and interaction in play.”

The show’s real triumph is a surreal sequence that aims to re-create Cobb’s illustration that represents the little girl’s memory as a magical garden. Glanville says “memory is an incredibly difficult concept for a three- or four-year-old to comprehend. The idea of memory being a place – that’s an accessible way of teaching it.” As the puppet of the girl sits on a swing, her different treasured objects are introduced around her and an audio recording plays in which the items are listed by local schoolchildren.

Glanville’s Polka engages the local community in their productions long before they open at the theatre. To create Error 404, an interactive show designed to ask big questions of its audience, Daniel Bye was appointed “philosopher in residence” at a Wimbledon primary school. A future Polka production takes inspiration from a box of black-and-white photographs in an archive at the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. For a whole school year, children will develop different ideas and plots that will be woven into the final version of the play. The result, says Glanville, “is that you’re developing an audience who will feel invested artistically in what happens”.

Polka’s summer production, Dot, Squiggle and Rest, is a co-production with the Royal Opera House (“it’s looking pretty avant garde,” says Glanville). Children’s theatre is increasingly found on major stages: Enda Walsh’s “mischievous” version of The Twits has just opened at the Royal Court, while that theatre’s upstairs space will this summer present their second series of short plays written by 8- to 11-year-olds. Meanwhile, Punchdrunk have taken over the National Maritime Museum with Against Captain’s Orders, for ages 6-12. “I’m really pleased that the sector’s growing,” says Glanville, while admitting: “For Polka, it’s a challenge.”

Donaldson’s bestselling books have long been box-office hits in the West End and around the UK. She says that years of working with illustrators has made her comfortable with such collaborations. “I try as far as possible not to breathe down their neck. I try not to be to controlling.” She was delighted with Tall Stories’ take on The Gruffalo (“I love quite physical, intimate theatre. I knew they were right”) and the company Scamp adapted several of her stories in one show at her own request. She’d been impressed when she saw them at the Edinburgh festival. This year, Donaldson is performing at the fringe herself: “We’re doing 25 performances of Gruffalos, Ladybirds and Other Beasts. Songs and stories. Including me, there’s going to be five actors. Malcolm’s playing the guitar.”

We peek into rehearsals at the Little Angel and see tiger paw prints on the walls and stars dangling from the ceiling. Donaldson says she attended a research and development session for The Paper Dolls and cried during the scene in which the girl becomes a mother.

At the end of our conversation, she reflects on this deceptively simple tale that has helped so many readers learn about loss. In 2003 Donaldson’s eldest son, Hamish, killed himself at the age of 25. “Maybe I’d been internally processing that,” she says. “So this was my cathartic book about how you’ve still got the memories. A lot goes on in the subconscious. In fact, looking at the books I wrote, Tiddler and Stick Man and Tabby McTat … [they are] all about people being separated from their families and then eventually getting back again. So maybe I was writing those because of that loss in my life.”