The Gruffalo: from page to stage
Date Posted: Thursday, January 18, 2007Author: Christen Pears
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Hands up if you know what a Gruffalo is! Not sure? Well let me enlighten you. “He has terrible tusks, and terrible claws, and terrible teeth in his terrible claws.” He’s also the creation of award-winning children’s author Julia Donaldson and will be making his first appearance at the Bermuda Festival tomorrow.
The Gruffalo and Friends is Julia’s stage adaptation of some of her most popular stories and features songs, readings and plenty of audience participation. Julia says: “When you write books you get asked to do a lot of signings and talks. I didn’t want to just talk to the children so I started acting out the stories and now, when I write a book, I think of the ways it could be dramatized.”
From modest beginnings, Julia’s performance has developed into a sell-out show, which has wowed audiences around the globe. The Bermuda performances mark the start of a world tour that will see the Gruffalo entertaining youngsters as far afield as Chile and Nepal.Julia will bring her characters to life on stage with the assistance of her husband, Malcolm.
The couple met at university while busking to raise money for charity. The busking led to a career in singing and songwriting for Julia. In 1993, one of the songs she wrote for television, A Squash and a Squeeze, was made into a book. This was followed by plays and other stories for children, including The Gruffalo, which established Julia as one of the UK’s best-loved children’s authors.
While Julia wrote, Malcolm was working as a consultant paediatrician but he kept up his musical skills by performing with Julia at weekends. This year he has taken things a step further and is currently on a year’s sabbatical, touring with Julia.He says: “I’ve always wanted to spend more time on children’s entertainment and this is the first time I haven’t been a medic for 33 years. I just love the opportunity to be a real actor and do a proper run. Until this year I’d never done more than five performances in a row so it’s been incredible.”
The couple have around 20 books to choose from and include about seven in a show, making sure each performance is fresh and different. She and Malcolm bring bags full of props to our interview. I’m introduced to the Gruffalo first and the characters from Monkey Puzzle. This is followed by a menagerie of other animals in the form of hats, which are worn by the children invited on stage to help act out A Squash and a Squeeze.“There’s a lot of variety. Some of it is interactive and I love getting the children in the audience up on stage to act out the stories and sing with us. They love it,” says Julia.
Julia dates her love of writing to her fifth birthday when her father gave her a poetry book. She devoured the verses and started making up poems of her own. Growing up in London, she and her sister Mary used to create imaginary characters and Julia wrote shows and choreographed ballets for the two to perform. While some children’s imagination diminishes as they get older, Julia’s has grown.
She has published 67 books, including Princess Mirror-Belle, Monkey Puzzle and A Squash and a Squeeze. Her children’s novel, The Giants and the Joneses is going to be made into a film by some of the team behind the hugely successful Harry Potter movies.
Julia is also passionate about helping children to read and she has developed a 36-book phonic reading scheme called Songbirds. She says: “Ever since I taught my sister to read by the phonic method, when I was six and she was four, I have been fascinated by words, sounds and spelling patterns. Combining phonics with fun was an enormous challenge of my favourite kind. Almost every word in every book had to be phonically decodable, and yet I wanted to write real stories which children would enjoy reading.”
Julia enjoys writing under restrictions such as rhyme, which she says gives her ideas she wouldn’t otherwise have. The Gruffalo was originally going to be a book about a tiger but she couldn’t find anything to rhyme with tiger. She says: “Then I thought up the lines: “Silly old Fox, doesn’t he know/There’s no such thing as a ______ ” and somehow the word “gruffalo” came to mind to fill the gap. The gruffalo looks the way he does because various things that just happened to rhyme (like toes and nose, and black and back).”
Julia’s fans will be rejoicing that tiger was such a difficult word to rhyme as The Gruffalo takes to the stage over the next few days.
The Gruffalo and Friends is at the Daylesford Theatre on January 19 at 4.40pm and 6.30pm and on January 20 and 21 at 2pm and 4.30pm. She will also be signing books on Saturday morning at the Bermuda Bookstore. For more information about Julia visit her website at www.juliadonaldson.co.uk