Philip Pullman’s Grimm Tales to be staged at Shoreditch Town Hall

Phillip Pullman. Photograph: Matt Hass

A hedgehog-boy who plays the bagpipes and a father who accidentally eats his son in a stew are two of the protagonists of Philip Pullman’s Grimm Tales for Young and Old, reimagined as an immersive story-telling event in the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall this month.

The stories have been adapted by the former artistic director of Salisbury Playhouse Philip Wilson, but Pullman, speaking from his Oxford home, insists that unlike with previous adaptations of his books, this time round he has no anxieties.

“I am merely the latest one of a hundred different storytellers who have told these tales,” Pullman says. “Philip [Wilson] has taken my version and done something different with it. No doubt some will see it who don’t know the stories and pass them on to their children or their class at school.”

The Brothers Grimm, born near Frankfurt in the 1780s, collected over 200 tales, passed down by word of mouth for generations.

Original tellings of Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood, to be dramatised alongside the lesser known The Three Snake Leaves, The Juniper Tree and Hans-my-Hedgehog, were events for all the family, the young and old each hearing the tales in a different way.

Pullman is a writer whose books have genuine cross-generational appeal, but although for ‘young and old’ some may judge the gruesomeness and rough justice meted out too strong for younger viewers. It is not a view Pullman shares.

“The principle is always justice,” he says. “It’s the bad people who are punished and the good who are rewarded. Children feel safe when that principle is applied so I’m very happy to carry that on. Besides children like the idea of eyes being pecked out and being made to dance with red hot shoes on and things like that.”

Pullman adds that “a story is better than a commandment” and that leaving children to make associations between the world of the stories and their own means they learn to make analogies.

“The power of analogy they can apply later on not only to literature but also to other things, like science,” he says.

“Plenty of great scientists have sworn by the power of analogy. Einstein for example when he was thinking about the speed of light imagined himself riding along on a beam of light. That’s the sort of thinking that fairy tales develop.”

Pullman’s role in the Shoreditch Town Hall production has been hands off, but he does have experience of theatre, not least back when he was a teacher in the seventies writing and producing school plays.

He is therefore aware of how difficult it is for actors to embody stock characters with no individual psychology.

“What an actor normally does is take another human being and live inside their being for the time it takes to do the play,” he says.

“But the characters in these stories aren’t really human in that sense. They might be called a king or a tailor or a sailor but they’re not like King Lear – they’re more like Old King Cole. So I’m very intrigued by how it will work.”

Philip Pullman’s Grimm Tales is at Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, EC1V 9LT from 14 March – 24 April