Letter sent to the Beowulf team at Folio Society, 14/11/23.
“Today the most enormous box arrived from Folio Society. Packed immaculately, it took me a while to work my way to the contents and unwrap the top copy of the three books within. I’m not sure I have the words to express what I feel, but I’ll do my best.
The edition is staggering, unarguably the most magnificent and significant creation of my career as an illustrator. My hands shook as I went through it page by page. The book design and text layouts, airily perfect. The translation from pen and ink artworks into illustrations, nothing short of a miracle. I worked on the drawings for many months, so I know what they look like in every detail because my nose was practically glued to them as I tapped away into the small hours rendering all that pointillism. But even though they’re all but tattooed on the insides of my eyelids, seeing them afresh and reinvented by the inversions and additions of colour, I’m knocked sideways. (The printing of the images is perfect in every way.) I’m so happy that the book is steeped in all the right traditions, and yet feels boldly contemporary. The binding and box are wonderful beyond all my imaginings and anticipation. Sumptuous in every way, the sensations of opening and turning the pages of the edition become visceral. Everything under the fingertips silky to the touch. The scents of the book, the leather, paper, glue and ink, all immersive and thrilling.
Sunday marked my seventy-second birthday, and Beowulf has been the best present. Not all book outcomes can be happy. I’ve made books in the past for which my hopes were high but things were not, in the end, done well. However all disappointments crumble before this edition of a text I love. Seriously, I could die happy knowing I’d made this one book.
Above: promotional animated video for Beowulf produced by David W. Slack
I had no idea just how lavish the book was to be when I first began work on it. It was only stage by stage that it began to dawn on me that the binding and clamshell box, built at the bookbinders Smith Settle in Leeds, were going to be works of art in their own right. I made all the illustrations at the size they were to be printed, so from the start I was aware that the edition was going to be on a handsome scale.
Above: Pen and ink illustrations in progress on my desk
Reviews from the Folio Society Website
Heroic volume for a heroic tale! I could smell the vellum the moment I opened the beautiful cloth-covered box. Wonderful. The book’s cover and the marvellous illustrations are reminiscent of Sutton Hoo without being exact copies. The thick, high quality paper is a joy to handle. The new Introduction is interesting. This is a volume to treasure. Really not too pricey considering its very high quality, the greatness of the tale and the beauty of the Heaney translation.
Review by Mr James Barry on 03/01/24 *****
Simply a stunning classic which I will hold for a lifetime and pass on to be enjoyed. The design and illustrations take you into the mythology with a powerful effect.
Review by a customer on 18/07/23 *****
A stunning book I can’t fault in any way.
Review by Steve Shaw-Wright on 21/07/23 *****
Extra large format book expertly produced with high quality components and materials. Not a single defect in craftsmanship. Oh, and my favourite translation by the way!
I designed the Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre for Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop in 2016 and it was published in 2017. It’s still available at the shop, having been re-printed several times. It comes as a 6 x A4 sheet kit in an envelope, requiring a craft-scalpel, cutting mat and glue to assemble. The original commission had been to create a ‘model’ theatre with a couple of scenes and characters to display, but by the end of the project I’d created a complete toy theatre at a small scale, with instructions for building the stage, together with scenery and characters to perform the play script I adapted from the fairy tale, and even a theatre poster to advertise a performance.
During the Covid lockdowns, in solidarity with the difficulties faced by all small shopkeepers trying to run their businesses, I gave the rights of the Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre to Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop, so the business would no longer be obliged to pay me royalties. It was a small but I hope significant gesture of support during very hard-to-negotiate times.
Simon was a wonderful interviewer. He’d undertaken meticulous and lengthy research and was well prepared to take me back along the pathway to childhood and the roots of my love of toy theatre. We could have talked for days about our shared passions for folk art, the Erzgebirge tradition of toys and the magic of toy theatre, but in the end we had to wrap it up in just under an hour. Simon is the artist behind the wonderful shadow-boxes published by Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop, some still available at the Pollock’s online store.
In 2019 Olivia Ahmad wrote about Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ explorations of Hansel & Gretel for Varoom magazine.
Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ retellings of classic fairy tale Hansel & Gretel have an edge. Taking in the original tale’s horrific neglect, abuse and murder, Clive has adapted the story into a picture book, toy theatre and original stage production. Olivia Ahmad looks at Clive’s startling manifestations of the familiar story.
“The boy was called Hansel, the girl was called Gretel – hence the title, Hansel & Gretel.” So the narrator opened Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ 2018 staging of his version of the European folk tale, first recorded by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. The performance had the subtitle a nightmare in eight scenes, which undermined any notion that Clive’s combination of animation and puppetry would be a saccharine adaptation of the story of the witch who tempts two lost children into her house made of gingerbread. “It’s a dark and brutal story”, he says, “the mother has been cruel and treacherous, and is dead by the time the children return home, with no explanation of what happened to her. Gretel has killed the witch in the most dreadful manner, which is not just something you can brush aside. There will be psychological scars. So the story is odd and downright nasty and has too often been glossed in endless re-tellings. It was just too good a chance to miss.”
Clive first took up the chance to envision the story for a book in 2012, inspired by a childhood memory. “I had a Toby Twirl annual,” he explains. “There was a story of a witch who captured Toby and imprisoned him. The pictures of her terrified and enthralled me. She stuck like a burr in my imagination and she’s been there ever since. When in an idle moment some years ago I felt the need to be drawing a witch, I chose Hansel & Gretel as the vehicle simply because a witch was central to the plot. I painted the characters onto a set of enamelware plates for a bit of fun, for no other purpose than for use at home. And in so doing, I laid the foundations for the larger project, though I didn’t know it at the time.”
The plate designs, produced with hand-cut stencils reminiscent of European folk art, migrated from Clive’s kitchen shelves in 2014 when he adapted them into a series of illustrations for Random Spectacular magazine. After a passing comment at social media that he would like to expand the magazine piece into a picture book, Random Spectacular agreed to publish one. Clive envisioned a dark tale, one that asked difficult questions: “What happens to children who kill? What effect will it have on them?”
The character design of the siblings was vital to telling their story: “The children that I designed right at the start were really simple. There was a touch of St Trinian’s to them: short and pod-like with skinny arms and legs and dressed in school uniforms. Though caricatured there was a tenderness and bewilderment to them that was touching. Hansel is incredibly passive throughout, a poor lost puppy. Gretel appears meek, though later manifests an awesome inner Ninja.”
Alongside the cast of characters appear occasional motifs drawn from European toys and popular design ephemera that Clive has gathered over the years. “It’s not exactly a collection”, he explains, “but a loose gathering of objects that interest, intrigue and move me. Some inherited and some sought. I find that vintage toys worm their ways into my imagination and from there into my work.” While these elements represented a personal history, moments like Hansel and Gretel making their getaway with the aid of a duck based on a 1950s Fisher Price pull-toy, make Clive’s fantasy world uncannily familiar.
For the rendering of the book Clive made separations, a technique previously unfamiliar to him. Creating a drawing for each coloured layer of an illustration, the layers of drawings were then scanned and coloured digitally according to Pantone references he selected to create a sugared almond palette.
The Random Spectacular picture book was published in 2016, and the same year Clive was commissioned for another Hansel & Gretel project by Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop in Covent Garden, which sells historic and contemporary cut-out-and-assemble toy theatres. The commission to create the Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre resonated with Clive’s childhood: “As a boy I’d cut out, coloured in and performed Pollock’s productions on a home-made stage constructed from a cornflakes packet, and so this was a dream come true for me.”
He initially suggested an adaptation of his Hansel & Gretel picture book, and while the Pollock’s project went on to incorporate some of the atmosphere of it, many of the more grotesque elements were considered “way too scary” for the toy theatre’s intended family audience. So Clive embarked on yet another adaptation of the story, re-fashioning it to create a meta- production in miniature, perhaps informed by his early career as a performer: The Pollock’s Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre starts from the point where the picture book finishes. “Having survived the ordeal of the witch, the children leave home to make their way in the world. Arriving in the big city they’re picked up by a theatre impresario who promises fame and fortune if they sign a contact with him, and they duly end up starring in a pantomime version of their own story, though with most of the unpalatable bits edited out.
So no wicked mother ending up being murdered by their father, and a much tamer version of a witch who doesn’t have tentacles where her nose should be!” The performance takes place at the fictional ‘Theatre Royal, Jury Lane’, a play on word of London’s Theatre Royal in Drury Lane.
The Benjamin Pollock’s Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre was published in 2017, and while light-hearted in tone, it retained some of the gothic horror of the picture book with its poisonous candy blues and pinks overlaid with a blanket of dark pencil hatching. The flatpack consists of a stage, proscenium arch, scenes, characters and props, along with a script and a poster to ‘advertise’ the production.
The following year, Clive’s Hansel & Gretel: a nightmare in eight scenes premiered on a life-size stage at the Cheltenham Music Festival. It subsequently toured the UK, finishing at the Barbican in London where a performance was recorded for broadcast Christmas week 2018 on BBC Radio 3.
For this his largest imagining of the story – a combination of live narration, music, animation and tabletop and shadow-screen puppetry – Clive collaborated with producer Kate Romano and the Goldfield Ensemble. The producer had originally visited Clive to discuss another project, but after seeing his Pollock’s designs suggested they make a music theatre production about the ill-fated brother and sister.
Clive recommended the producer enlist the poet Simon Armitage to write the libretto. Simon took the story in a completely different direction by placing the children into a contemporary context. “I think it was genius on Simon’s part to set the story in a conflict zone, and to rewrite the adults as loving parents fearful that their children might become casualties of war,” Clive says. “That changed everything for me in terms of how we relate to the family. They’re not dysfunctional, but find themselves in terrible circumstances.” The performance opened with animations of marching toy soldiers, which soon fall into the disarray of battle. Hansel and Gretel’s parents send their children away from this carnage in order to protect them.
However without their parents’ protection, they become enticed and ensnared by a witch. When she prepares to bathe them so they can be trafficked, Gretel fears that the hot water for the bath will be used for boiling them alive. “Everything that we see and hear is filtered through the overheated imaginations of the children who are full of fears and misunderstandings,” Clive explains.
“Everything in the production, from the predatory witch and her grubby icing-sugared cottage, to the layout of its bleak interior conjured from a doll’s house, is how they see things.”
Hansel and Gretel were puppets designed by Clive and made by Jan Zalud. “I needed the puppets to function at a different level to their picture book counterparts, and be fully up to the emotional requirements of Simon Armitage’s text, ” Clive says, and his designs evolved from research on the experiences of children in transit camps. This approach was not welcomed by the Goldfield ‘project team’, who reported his drawings made them think of children in concentration camps. “I stuck to my guns,” he remembers, “because I knew the direction was the right one.”
Only one Hansel and one Gretel puppet appeared in the production, so the design and execution created appropriately neutral expressions for the puppet’s faces onto which many thoughts could be projected by audiences. Because the streaming would see them much magnified on the screen, they’d need an innate grace of movement so the moments of tenderness and vulnerability would withstand close scrutiny.
Several collaborators were assembled and directed by Clive to realise the project. The composer Matt Kaner had come to it through Kate Romano. Clive invited Peter Lloyd to produce shadow puppets of the children’s parents and the witch, Pete Telfer, to film the animations to be projected onto the stage, and his regular collaborator and assistant Phil Cooper, to be in charge of the model sets and painted backgrounds for the puppets. Puppeteer Di Ford came to the project at Clive’s invitation having previously worked with him on the stage production of The Mare’s Tale, and after a puppeteer audition and workshop, Lizzie Wort joined the company. Costumier Oonagh Creighton Griffiths was brought in to dress the puppets.
As director of such a broad team, how did Clive retain his vision of the piece? His earlier career was in stage direction and choreography, and so he knows his choice of collaborators is vital. “I mostly work with people I know well and feel at ease with,” he says, “the team are my professional family. When we’re all pulling together there’s not really a hierarchy. Once briefed I trust them. Sometimes they bring me what I expect, and occasionally there are surprises. There need to be the possibilities that some elements may exceed my expectations or bring something entirely unanticipated.”
Clive’s own vintage toys played an important role onstage. One hundred year old German building blocks became the playthings of the children, and clockwork ‘pecking chickens’ stood in for the flock of birds that ate Hansel’s trail of breadcrumbs.
The chickens and a Russian clockwork ‘singing’ bird are also due to appear in Clive’s next iteration of the story: a richly illustrated edition of Simon Armitage’s libretto, produced by independent publisher Design for Today and due for release later this year.
“A toy,” Clive says, “can open your heart and make you remember what wonder feels like.” However his adoption of these tokens from the past is not an indulgence in nostalgia. “I’m not such a fool as to think that yesterday was better. I was there and it wasn’t! My explorations are all about objects being repositories of histories. They’re like radio dials, and if you twiddle them you ‘hear’ the past. That past can be anything, from sweet to despairing. It’s the focus that’s all important, and what the focus opens in the mind and heart.”
Olivia Ahmad, 2019.
Hansel & Gretel was published subsequent to this article and in 2020 won the V&A Illustrated Book Award. It’s still available from the publisher at THIS LINK. In October a new hardback edition is due out from Faber & Faber.
Above, the 2019 Design for Today edition of Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes, and below, the new edition forthcoming from Faber & Faber in October 2023.
Please Click on the title above to watch the videos embedded in this post.
Above: click to view the book trailer for Beowulf
Clive: David, you were undertaking trial digital work for me while I was working on the illustrations for Beowulf. I made them in black ink on white board, but had it in mind to see how they’d look when inverted to white on black. What you produced provided me with inverted images of drawings and digital colourings of them throughout all the earlier stages of the book’s creation. Although the final additions of colour were done at Folio Society, you did all the preliminary ‘tests’ that enabled me to make the decisions ready to brief the Folio team.
Above: detail of illustration from the book after image inversion and digital colouring by Folio Society.
Below: original ink artwork on mountboard with pencil trim guide, before inversion and colouring.
David: Oh it was such a joy to have a private viewing of your Beowulf drawings, and because I was messing around with them digitally, I could easily produce many different versions. It was fascinating wasn’t it, that some worked instantly as inverted images, while others were more powerful as you’d drawn them?
Above: finished ink drawings piling up on the artist’s desk.
Clive: In the end we included some drawings as made and some inverted. The combination worked well.
David: I made some red versions which were just OK, but I remember layering a deep spot-lit blue-green with the image for the first time, and it pulsed and sang immediately.
Below: trial colour images of inversions made by David.
But I think you had committed to the blue at that point, and the intensely saturated blue-on-black and black-on-blue that their production manager achieved in print for your full-bleed double-page illustrations, is way beyond anything I’ve ever seen in print. I’ve done a lot of printmaking through the years, but how they achieved that glowing deepest blue is beyond me. It pulses with some sort of other life and is just unforgettable. I know that you were blown away by the book when you saw it.
Clive: I couldn’t stop shaking when I received and opened my copy. I was anxious because I knew by this point the edition was printed, bound and boxed, and there could be no turning back. I’d seen many page proofs over the months, but between the last proof seen and the finished book the production manager had worked miracles. I was simply speechless when I saw the the quality of the printing.
Because of your contributions at preliminary stages, and because you knew the illustrations inside out, it was inevitable that at some point we’d start talking about the potential of the images to be animated into life, and that’s exactly what happened.
David: Well of course, what a gift this was! Your drawings for Beowulf were in a paper-cut style, and so ready-made for shadow theatre puppetry. I’d learned to animate a while back when we’d made an animated film to promote the Design for Today Beauty and BeastToy Theatre. With that experience under my belt, how difficult could it be to create a three or four second animation as a test run for a potential Beowulf book-trailer? I have to say that it was BLOODY difficult. I’m pretty sure that the learning curve was so steep that at more than one point my neuron’s firing registered on Google Earth. But anyway, this idea of a moment of animation er… well, it snowballed rather didn’t it?
Above: articulated paper maquette made as a compositional aid during the early stages of planning the book.
David: Much of your preparatory-stage work for illustration is built upon the idea of the jointed maquette, so animation is a perfect fit. And of course you’ve made many frame animations in the past, for example on your stage productions of Hansel and Gretel and The Soldiers Tale. By now you and I had made many animations together, almost all set within the bounds of a toy theatre. The images of Beowulf were so exciting to imagine unshackled and animated into life. They were perfectly suited to the medium.
Clive: Because we felt some animation sequences could enhance the promotional video Folio would be sure to make to launch the book, I decided to ask them whether they might consider permitting us to submit a couple of trial animation sequences by way of introducing the team to the idea. Luckily they were open to that and you began work almost immediately.
I recall conversations we had about the ‘character’ of the animation, degrading the imagery to make it look almost like ‘found footage’ with that sense of vintage film scratchiness and fluttering. You might have different recollections to me, but among references we discussed there was the idea to animate the dragon almost as if it were some kind of nematode worm being filmed on a slide under a microscope. I think I may have mentioned the title sequence for the film Seven to you, with its sense of flickering unease. And then of course there was our shared passion for Smallfilms and the work of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin. It’s just not possible to be in a world of Norsemen without having a conversation about Noggin the Nog.
David: Ah yes! The David Fincher/Smallfilms mash up. I loved your suggestion of a squirming dragon as a micro-organism under magnification. It adds an edge of discomfort to see inserts of a different texture, speed and animation style within the piece. I used the same concept in the jerking movements of the wolf and the tentacles whenever they appear.
Above: black original ink drawing and the digital translation to colour in the book.
David: Tonal changes are essential to my mind, especially when the piece is very dark, or heavily stylised. The most incredible imagery in a movie can actually become dull after a while, unless the viewer is shaken out of it – like a little hit of spice. I watched versions of scenes of the Beowulf animation without the degrading filters we talked about. Your drawings moving across the screen were so striking without the added optical effects that I found it tough to dull them down. Nevertheless I added scratchy inclusions of scrabbling colour to make the films glow and dull in turn, and the decision worked wonders in unifying the animations and the sequences of the book itself. One of the things I had to keep reminding myself was that this wasn’t a trailer for a movie, but for a beautiful book. (The Hitchcock in me was forever edging it to a movie trailer.)
Clive: We waited with bated breath once the sample shots had been delivered to the Folio team, but when the responses came they were wholeheartedly enthusiastic. Far from delivering a few short cuts to be edited into a promotional film, we were tasked with producing the whole shebang. After a briefing Zoom with the team at Folio we got working. There were to be 2 x 30 second films, one at a format for viewing on smart-phones, and a second for viewing on laptops and tablets.
David: Oh weren’t they wonderful? They showed such faith in us that I did feel confident about how it would turn out. Working with such carefully considered and rendered drawings I knew the results would be beautiful. Like cooking with the best ingredients. Although the brief was for 30 second films, I overshot and both edits came in at one minute and six seconds. I think just over the minute stands up very well. I would have been pushed to get the pace right in 30 second films.
Clive: I agree. 30 seconds would have been too rushed. As the films stand, each at just over a minute, they fly by when watching them.
As with all our animation projects, once we’d discussed I absented myself to concentrate on sourcing the music. You in the meantime were off like a rocket. I remember your utter confidence that you knew where to go with all this, waiting only on the music to provide the structures to the films. You were not just animator on the project working to my brief. You were now Animation Producer!
David: And a very cocky one at that, due in no small part to the confidence and enthusiasm you demonstrated in allowing me to hack up and rearrange your artworks.
While you researched the music, I got busy anatomising your Beowulf characters to assemble a cache of puppet elements. You always show an astonishing faith in me to infill the drawings when I amputate an arm, head or leg, or need to find fingers or a neck. I in turn feel safe in the knowledge that you’ll always find the perfect piece of music which will make the pace, depth and rhythm of the story appear clearly in my head. This time you found four tracks, one of which though amazing, we both thought a little too disturbing. (Maybe it’ll be right at another time for another film.) I viewed the films hundreds of times when making them, and have watched them many times since completion. I’m confident the two music pieces we settled on had just the right aesthetic, power, drive and primal drama. People report that they watch them repeatedly, and a big part of that is because the music makes them so moreish.
Above: click to view this animated book-trailer for the new Folio Society edition of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.
In her poem Mares’ Tails Catriona Urquhart recalls the narrator’s unease at the sight of linen bed-sheets on his mother’s washing-line. In this and all but two of the titles in the poetry collection, the poet ventriloquises her subject, my father, Trevor. Catriona was a great gatherer of stories, and in her years of friendship with my father, she collected and stored many of his. She winkled out of him far more than he’d ever shared with his family. I think he was unguarded with her, and recalled his life with real pleasure.
Mares’ Tails
I lie
and coax the clouds down
from the sky
and grab the mares’ tails
and fly
far up
into the blue
and gazing down see
all my landscape
small and strange and new.
The church tower squat and square,
the lilac shadows of the vicar’s yews,
the brook, a silver eel
that snakes around the patient cows,
mere dots of brown.
Ed Hockey, bicycling from the town
seems not to move.
My mother’s washing line
is pegged with people:
Joan and Hetty billow out
but Herb hangs limp
and Vince is twisted at the end.
The linen sheets
that pinion me at night
encasing me in wild dreams,
terror, nightmare,
are waving free
so innocently.
You could not think
they meant to choke and smother.
Catriona Urquhart (1953 – 2005)
It was so very easy to share with Catriona, because when she loved a person she bestowed her full attention and appreciation. Trevor revelled in that. They used to go off on little adventures together, him whisking her away to his favourite country pubs and beauty spots around Monmouthshire, or his regular Italian cafe for lunch in Newport’s docklands, where Maria always had his place set for him. These were his late years and Catriona, who was reeling from the loss of her father, found comfort in mine. Trevor loved this late-blooming friendship, unlikely though it was. He twinkled in her company. They both twinkled.
Trevor didn’t make it into the new millennium. He died at age eighty-six in 1999. He’d been eighty-four when he’d opened up and shared with us the strange event of his childhood that had shaped his life, so there had been just two years for us – for me and Catriona – to gather what facts we could of the occasion when the midwinter mummers had called at his home and Trevor, who was just a toddler, believed the Devil had come for him. It was unlikely that in the hurly-burly of excitement anyone present saw or recognised the effect of the child’s encounter with a ‘Mari Lwyd’. (Grey Mare) Thereafter Trevor believed with the simple certainty of a child, that if ever he spoke of what he’d witnessed, then the Devil would return to carry him away. And because he never told another soul, the memory stuck. He didn’t recognise it for what it was – a celebratory folk tradition – because in imagination it had grown into something private and terrifying, an atavistic horror carried with him into adulthood and hidden away from sight. He simply had no idea that the Devil was a decorated horse’s skull on a stick, with the capering operator hidden beneath a shroud-like draped bedsheet.
All his life Trevor was terrified of entangling sheets, whether too tight on beds or cracking in winds on washing-lines. He never read a ghost story, not a single one, but had he laid eyes on M. R. James Oh Whistle and I’ll come to You My Lad, he wouldn’t have got into a bed again, ever. In hospital, at the end, with his dreams resurrecting old fears, he fought with sheets tucked tight by caring nurses to prevent him falling out of bed. I loosened him and murmured soothingly, stroked his forehead and told him everything would be fine. And then at the end, it was, and he was still.
Catriona died on May Day in 2005. She was a mere fifty-two. She’d been drifting on a tide of Morphine, surfacing infrequently, briefly and peacefully in those last weeks, cared for by those who loved her and the wonderful Macmillan nurses, tending and vanquishing her pain. It’s said she chose her time, May Day having always been significant for her, so perhaps at some deep level she knew the calendar date and took her leave on the day she loved.
The Mare’s Tale was the sole volume of Catriona’s poems published in her lifetime. The poems were originally intended as the text for my 2001 exhibition of the same title, but when Nicolas McDowall of Old Stile Press came to our house and found her manuscript on our kitchen table, he decided the collection must be suitably honoured in a beautiful edition. And so it was, illustrated by me, printed by Nicolas at Catchmays Court in the Wye Valley, bound in super-fast time by The Fine Bindery and published by Old Stile Press. Launched at the opening of the exhibition at Newport Museum and Gallery, it was the only collection of poems published in Catriona’s lifetime. She destroyed all her earlier work, a fact discovered only after her death. She was always hardest on herself, and had clearly taken in hand what she chose to be remembered by. The Mare’s Tale is a small masterpiece and we are lucky to have it. She was a wordsmith down to her bootlaces.
When I was working on the recently published Beauty & Beast, written by Olivia McCannon and published by Design for Today, I thought it might be a lovely idea to additionally make a toy theatre version of the book. It would be sold separately as an item in its own right, with a script by Olivia. However I knew it couldn’t be a simple matter of recreating the illustrations reduced and trimmed to fit a toy stage. It would require a complete translation into a new language, the language of the toy theatre. In this I was aided and abetted by Olivia, who absolutely understood the nature of translation and transformation, and was able to brilliantly magic her ravishingly beautiful and heartrending text for Beauty & Beast, into a clever, funny, galloping romp of a pantomime for the toy theatre. Artist David W. Slack, too, came aboard, and began translating my illustrations into what would work on a toy theatre stage. We three took one thing and turned it into another. I cannot tell you how we did it. The process defies analysis and certainly defeats the retelling. I found at all stages I was working intuitively. I think we all were. But here, by way of explanation, I’ve illustrated this piece with images of the toy theatre, set against the illustrations which inspired them.
Even the name of the art form is deceptive: Toy Theatre. The word ‘Toy’ makes it sound juvenile, a thing of the nursery, and in fact the toy theatre was born in the eighteenth century and reached the dizzying heights of its invention in the nineteenth as a plaything of young people. (Though I suspect that a lot of those who played most were not children at all.) It sprang out of a desire of theatre-goers to have souvenirs of the productions they’d enjoyed, and sensing the commercial potential of this, the printmakers of the day began first to offer portrait sheets of actors in their roles, and later, ‘toy’ stages on which small, cut-out paper actors could strut and gesture through melodramas, romances and pantomimes. (Toy theatre makers were only able to thrive where there was a lively theatre industry on which they could draw for inspiration and their market, which is why the English tradition of toy theatres developed in and around London’s theatre-land.) Though modern toys would eventually displace toy theatres, the tradition persisted culturally if marginally in Britain, largely because the last printer/seller of toy theatres, Benjamin Pollock, managed to scratch a living into the twentieth century.
After Benjamin Pollock, the faded memories of toy theatre clung on in the small and privately owned Pollock’s Toy Museum in Scala Street, which this year closed its doors for the last time (though there are plans to one day open it in a new premises), and in Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop in Covent Garden, which is a modern business bearing an old name selling mainly modern toys, but also a range of reproduction antique toy theatres and toy theatres by contemporary designers, myself included.
Below: illustration from Beauty & Beast of Beast carrying Beauty to her chamber, and the set design of Beauty’s room from the toy theatre adaptation:
I was given a set of yellowing toy theatre sheets to cut-out and play with when I was a child, a gift of the actor/author Bill Meilen. Some bore the name Benjamin Pollock. I made my own toy stage to hold them. When I left Wales to attend school in London, I discovered the Pollock’s Toy Museum and the die was cast. At weekends and with time my own, I haunted the place. Toy Theatre got a grip on my young heart and has held it fast for a lifetime.
But how does it work? How may a production made for a real stage shrink to what works on a toy stage? (Or in this case, how does a wide-format illustration made for a book shrink to the square aperture of a toy stage?) It’s not simply a matter of scaling down, though that can be done too, and often is, and with mainly poor results. By some alchemy when the stage shrinks, then new rules apply, and new ways of creating and seeing have to be devised.
The toy theatre may imitate the backdrops, wings, headers and cut-cloths of nineteenth century stages, but there has to be a translation to the reduced form. Think of it this way. If you took a delicious sweet from its wrapper and popped it into your mouth, it would be delightful because the small size suits the intensity of flavour. There would not be a better eating experience were it to be enlarged to a giant size. It exists, at its best, at the scale intended. So it is with the toy theatre, only the other way around.
When you take something devised as life-sized, it is not better for being successfully shrunk to small. It becomes too cluttered, too visually indigestible, too busy. No, the toy theatre has to be a new thing. It has to be tailored to its constraints, though as is so often the way with creativity, the limitations can be made to work to advantage. It is not the real world, but an absolutely unique one, with different rules and languages. At its best it can be a doorway to another country, the way past the coat-hangers into Narnia or down the rabbit-hole into Wonderland. I’ve been tumbling down the rabbit-hole of toy theatre all my life, and I’m tumbling still.
Beauty & Beast, a retelling of an old tale with text by Olivia McCannon and illustrations by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, may be purchased direct from the publisher, as can the Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre:
It’s with huge delight that I can reveal, at last, that my current big project is the commission to illustrate a new Beowulf for The Folio Society, in the acclaimed translation by Seamus Heaney. The illustrations must remain shrouded in secrecy until the book is ready for launch, and I won’t be showing work in progress. Suffice to say that I’m already deeply bedded in the project, awakening every morning excited to be in the thick of it and enormously enjoying the many discussions and planning sessions with my wonderful Folio Society art director, Raquel Leis Allion. But this little vignette is all you’re going to see before the book is published, because we’re keeping the images under lock and key.
I’ve greatly enjoyed the notion of ‘the monster’, whether in novels, in film/tv or in folklore and mythology. Aged eight I was sold on the idea of the ‘Gorgon’ from the first moment I read about her, and the Hydra, too, and the three-headed Cerberus, guard-dog of Hades. As a child, when too young to actually see X-rated films, I pored over imported copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland, so I knew all about the Universal Studios monsters – which were vintage even back in the fifties when they were being given lush spreads in the magazine – long before I ever saw the films themselves. I thrilled to the images of Lon Chaney being unmasked in The Phantom of the Opera, of Bela Lugosi curling back his lips in a pasty-faced vampiric leer, and Karloff sitting in Jack Pierce’s makeup chair being transformed into one of the most iconic monsters of cinema history.
I’m not a fan of all ‘horror’ – in extreme form I find it distasteful – but when makers are creative in producing something that nails you to your seat, the ride can be thrilling. I particularly love it when the scary bits are not too in-your-face. One of the greatest strengths of Alien, is that it pre-dated CGI, and so the fully-grown creature is half-shadowed and all the more alarming for it. I think the best scares in Jurassic Park are in the kitchen where a pair of Velociraptors hunt down the children, because most of what you see is staggeringly clever animatronics and puppetry, made even better by masterful editing. When the monster is actually there, in close contact with the actors, and not just a man in green wielding a ball-on-a-stick to cue their eye-lines for special effects to be added later, there are worlds of difference in the performances.
I’ve particularly enjoyed it when I’ve been given illustration opportunities to engage with old-school classic creatures. For the cover of These Our Monsters (2019, English Heritage), I was able to trace back to Bram Stoker’s account of Vlad Dracula, which was quite an eye-opener because the original descriptions are not remotely like any of the character’s film incarnations. (The cover image here is for The Dark Thread by Graeme Macrae Burnet, who sets his troubling and elegiac short story in Whitby at a time when the mentally fragile Stoker has returned to confront his own creation.)
There were entirely new monsters in the book, too, and I loved creating what Sarah Hall only suggests in The Hand Under the Stone, which is about as close as I’ve ever come to making a monster inhabiting a similar ‘between-worlds’ plane of existence to those found in the ghost stories of M. R. James which I love so much.
I’ve made several varieties of Witch for two quite different books on the theme of Hansel & Gretel, for a stage production in which she was presented via shadow-puppetry, and for a toy theatre for Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop.
My first Hansel & Gretel book was a more or less textless picture-book for St Jude’s in which there was a Witch scary enough to require a warning for more sensitive readers. I made her glaucous-eyed and short-sighted – as witches traditionally were in some folk and fairy-tales, the Grimm Brothers telling of Hansel & Gretel included – but I dressed her in a garment embroidered with eyes to send out a different kind of message. (I stole the idea from a portrait of the first Queen Elizabeth in a gown embroidered with eyes and ears, as a coded message to her subjects – and more particularly her enemies – that the monarch saw all and heard all!)
A short-sighted Witch in a garment sewn with many eyes
For the Simon Armitage version of the tale, Hansel & Gretel, a Nightmare in Eight Scenes, I collaborated with paper-cut artist Peter Lloyd, providing him with rough drawings that he then transferred into elaborate stop-motion shadow-puppets. To begin with Hansel and Gretel saw only a crone in a bonnet and cloak, but when the cloak came off, the full horror of a spiny crab-like carapace was revealed, reverse-joint legs – like a bird – and a tail with a stinger that snaked into view and coiled and thrashed about.
Guide drawing for Peter Lloyd’s shadow puppets
Close up hands for the Witch created by Peter Lloyd
Animating a large Peter Lloyd shadow-puppet Witch’s head, used for close-ups
When Simon Armitage’s libretto for the stage production was published in 2019 as an illustrated book by Design for Today, I made a monstrous Witch – seen below as she’s turned into a gobstopper when Gretel pushes her into a cauldron of sweets boiled down into molten sugar – and a monstrous personification of the haunted forest, too, wonderfully described by the poet in a text that’s an illustrator’s dream.
The Witch transformed into a gobstopper
The personification of a fairytale haunted wood
Beowulf is jam-packed with the eponymous hero’s encounters with monsters of many varieties. There’s a deep-sea-creature that drags him to watery depths, a dragon he slays – though he becomes fatally wounded in the process – and that arch-monster of literature and father of all horrors that came after him, Grendel, who is of a sufficient size to stuff thirty human corpses into a bag and make off with them. Beowulf tears off Grendel’s arm as a trophy, and the fatally wounded monster slinks away to die ‘off-stage’. We then discover there’s worse waiting in the wings, for Grendel has a mother, and she’s as wrathful as a nest of Asian Hornets on the warpath when she sets out to avenge her son’s death. (And you thought the vengeful mother was invented by the makers of the second Alien film. Turns out that she goes back to Anglo-Saxon literature, and before that to even more ancient mythologies and tales.)
So I am thrilled to be making images of these archetypal monsters, and hopefully in ways that will be unexpected and visceral enough to raise a few hairs at the nape of the neck. But in a good way, of course.
In 2016 Random Spectacular published a picture-book of my dark re-working of the fairy tale Hansel & Gretel. There was no text, save what I hand-lettered into the illustrations.
The following year Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop in Covent Garden commissioned a toy theatre kit from me, based on the book.
In response to the two publications, Goldfield Productions engaged me to direct and design a stage production. Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes with music by Matthew Kaner and a libretto by Simon Armitage, was created for a chamber consort, a narrator/singer and two puppeteers, and it premiered at the 2018 Cheltenham Music Festival followed by a five month tour.
Simon Armitage meets Gretel for the first time at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
A matinee at the Barbican was recorded and broadcast by BBC Radio 3 Christmas week 2018.
The following year Design for Today published a hardback edition of Simon Armitage’s libretto that I illustrated, and in 2020 it won me the V&A Illustrated Book Award.
Bombs destroy the children’s formally idyllic world.
In 2023 there’s to be a major exhibition of my work on the theme of Hansel & Gretel at Oriel Myrddin in Carmarthen. The exhibition is to include original artworks made for the several publications, my project books, maquettes and preparatory works.
Auditions for puppeteers at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
Lay-out for an illustration from my project book.
There will be many items from the stage production, including shadow puppets created by Peter Lloyd, set models built by Phil Cooper, vintage toys that I loaned to the production and a huge doll’s house, the inside of which I decorated and filmed to represent the interior of the Witch’s lair.
Peter Lloyd’s shadow puppet for the Witch being animated by me. Photograph by permission of Phil Cooper, who was my wonderful design assistant on the production.
Designer Phillip Cooper animating Lebkuchen he’d made for the production.
One of several animations from the production used to illustrate Hansel and Gretel’s imaginative worlds of play.
My little Russian clockwork singing bird (she was made in St Petersburg) appeared in the stage production, and then in the book published by Design for Today.
Permission for a loan to the gallery of the puppets of Hansel and Gretel designed by me for the production, has been turned down by Goldfield’s Artistic Director, Kate Romano. She gave dislike of me as her reason. Given that the costs of designing and making the puppets had been paid for out of an Arts Council grant, and given the budget was so tight that I personally paid a costume designer to create a wardrobe for them, her decision seems at best ill-judged. As the director of a charitable trust which has been extensively funded from philanthropic organisations, anyone might expect better from her than this. The exhibition will be especially appealing to children, and for a registered charity to deny a ‘museums accredited’ gallery the opportunity to inspire young minds with such beautiful examples of the art of puppet-making, is not merely perplexing, but frankly shameful.
I approached the Chair of the Goldfield Trust, Caroline Clegg, hoping that she might persuade Kate to change her mind and save the company from public scrutiny into a matter that looks very bad for both of them. It would be hard to tell from Caroline’s e-mail that she and I know each other, having both worked on the production for months when she was appointed by Kate as dramaturg to it. Weirdly, both her e-mails to me make it sound as though we’ve never met before. This has added another layer of the surreal to what has frequently felt decidedly strange when dealing with Kate Romano and Caroline Clegg. Here’s Caroline’s second e-mail to me:
Dear Mr Hicks-Jenkins,
In response to your recent request the Trustees of Goldfield Productions support Ms Romano’s decision not to loan the Hansel and Gretel puppets.
Kind regards
Ms Caroline Clegg
as Chair of Goldfield Productions
Why am I writing about all this now, so long after the event? Certainly not to persuade Kate Romano to change her mind about loaning the puppets. Over four years I’ve several times held out a hand of reconciliation in the hope of encouraging her to set aside resentments so we may together protect the legacy of what we made. I was and remain proud of my work on the stage production of Hansel & Gretel, and want to be able to share what was achieved in the exhibition. However everything I’ve written to Kate has gone unacknowledged and unanswered. There’s been not one e-mail reply to any of my attempts to lower the temperature of her antagonism. She is down a bunker in this matter, refusing to engage, and such behaviour in the world the way it is right now, is not a good look for anyone, let alone an arts administrator. Today I’m writing this because many are beginning to ask whether the puppets are going to be in the exhibition. Luckily because we have an ample record of the puppets in drawings, photographs and videos, they will be seen, though not be present.
It would be easier in many ways just to make a simple excuse for their absences which skates around what’s happened, but I see no reason to do that when Kate Romano and Caroline Clegg should clearly be the ones to explain why they’ve made the decision to hide the puppets from public view.
Puppeteers Di Ford and Lizzie Wort, who brilliantly brought Hansel and Gretel to life.
Simon’s reinvention of the fairy tale, is eerily prescient of what we’re seeing now in Ukraine. The puppets would have meant a great deal to many visitors had Kate Romano found it in her heart to lend them to the gallery, but she did not. The puppets were conceptualised and designed by me, their making supervised by me, in part funded by me and their performances on stage, shaped by me together with puppeteers Di and Lizzie. Kate’s reason for refusing the gallery loan appears to be all about personal enmity, which is troubling in a CEO in the performing arts. Anyone who feels that she made a decision that requires explanation, might take it up with her.
Kate Romano, CEO and Artistic Director of Goldfield Productions (Registered charity: 1173427) and CEO of Stapleford Granary Arts Centre.
The completed film of the Design for Today Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre that David W. Slack and I have been working on over the past several months, is now available for viewing at YouTube:
The film was made and originally released in five one-act instalments at Instagram. We’d intended it to be a promotion for the just published toy theatre and an encouragement for would-be performers, to show them what might be achieved with the model. However it swiftly evolved into something that was a creative project in its own right, and as David and I planned and worked, our ambitions for the film became greater.
Even though we elaborated on the presentation in ways that were clearly only possible in the realms of digital animation, we felt that the overall effect would be to encourage anyone performing the toy play to be inventive and give creativity a free hand.
I’d asked Olivia to give me a play-script that incorporated all the traditions I associate with nineteenth century toy theatre productions: actors directly addressing the audience, rhyming verses, jokes, songs, political references, allegorical characters and opportunities for sumptuous stage effects. But it was important too to have that sense of the slightly bonkers that I see in just about every historic toy theatre play script. Fairy tale is the right material to be allowed its head in matters of strangeness. Too much sanitising and it loses character. Beauty and the Beast as a narrative can be so much more than is usually allowed. Olivia has followed the threads of earlier iterations, but has reinvigorated the tale by making climate change and pollution the culprits for Beast’s condition, rather than a dark fairy’s curse. Moreover Beast is allowed to be more thoroughly himself than when the storyline moves toward a princely restoration. (When Jean Cocteau gave a first showing of his film La Belle et la Bête (1946) to its cast and technicians, he invited his friend Marlene Dietrich as his guest. As the end credits rolled she could be heard in the darkened viewing-room loudly wailing:
“Ou est ma Bête?”
Most audiences ever since have agreed with her.
The Beauty & Beast Team:
Animated Film: David Slack & Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Script: Olivia McCannon
Original Music for Time for a Change of Heart: Paul Sartin
Narrator: Jennifer Castle
Jennifer Castle’s Portrait Photography: Ross Boyask
Accompaniment for Time for a Change of Heart: Tricia Kerr Mullen
Adapted from the Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre published by Joe Pearson at Design for Today
The Design for Today Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre (see above) may purchased online, direct from the publisher:
All toy theatre is an abbreviation, by reason of the medium. Fifteen minutes is about the maximum length a toy theatre performance can sustain. However the complete fairy tale as retold by Olivia McCannon in Beauty & Beast, illustrated by me throughout, is to be published by Design for Today in Spring this year.
The Owl and the Nightingale will be performed as a reading at the Royal Court Theatre, Jerwood Theatre Downstairs.
In a new translation by the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, this witty and enchanting edition of the medieval debate poem will be directed by John Tiffany and read by Maxine Peake and Meera Syal with Simon Armitage.
Maxine Peake
Meera Syal
Portrait of Simon Armitage by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Following his acclaimed translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl, Simon Armitage shines a light on another jewel of Middle English verse. The disputed issues within the piece still resonate – concerning identity, cultural attitudes, class distinctions and the right to be heard.
Following the performance there will be a book signing in the Balcony Bar.
The Owl and the Nightingale reading is supported by The Institute of Digital Archaeology.
Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog: 