When Ceridwen Dovey was a mere 12 years old, she took on the lead role in her school’s production of The Little Mermaid. “Somewhat controversially,” Dovey, now an award-winning author and science writer, recalls, “my school decided to stage the original adaptation of The Little Mermaid — not the Disney version where she gets a happy ending.”
In the original fairy tale penned by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid — and here’s a spoiler alert — ultimately dies, her spirit ascending to heaven. Dovey vividly remembers the play’s conclusion, walking up a set of stairs enveloped in clouds of dry ice. “I could see all the kids in the audience sitting cross-legged on the floor and sobbing, tears pouring silently down all these children’s faces,” she recounts. “There was so much emotion in the room, and it was cathartic, it was like an outpouring … of grief.”
It was this profound emotional experience that resurfaced when Andy Packer, CEO and artistic director of Slingsby Theatre Company, approached Dovey to write a story based on another of Andersen’s fairy tales, The Little Match Girl. “I was really interested in channelling a 12-year-old’s thoughts and feelings because that was my first embodied experience of what his writing was about,” she explains.
Andersen’s original 1845 story depicts the little match girl enduring a freezing night on the street, too terrified to return home to her abusive father. To ward off the bitter cold, she lights her matches one by one, finding solace in the visions conjured by the flames, including a comforting image of her deceased grandmother. Tragically, she succumbs to the cold at the story’s end, but with a smile on her face, content at the prospect of reuniting with her grandmother in heaven.
Dovey observes that Andersen’s fairy tales, as exemplified by The Little Match Girl, were frequently melancholic, a stark contrast to the sanitised Disney adaptations that have gained immense popularity in the 150 years since the author’s passing. “He is OK with themes of death and mortality, but a lot of that gets scrubbed out in other versions of his work,” she notes.
Dovey’s reimagining of this poignant tale forms the basis for The Tree of Light, one of three adapted works collectively known as A Concise Compendium of Wonder, which Slingsby will present at the 2026 Adelaide Festival.
A Poignant Swansong
Packer commissioned Dovey, alongside fellow writers Jennifer Mills and Ursula Dubosarsky, to reimagine three classic fairy tales for a contemporary audience: the Brothers Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel, Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant, and Andersen’s The Little Match Girl. Packer highlights a shared thematic thread across these three original texts: humanity’s intricate relationship with nature. This resonates deeply with Slingsby’s ongoing commitment to exploring environmental concerns and the growing anxiety surrounding “our dissociation from the natural world as humans over a long period of time.”
The Little Match Girl holds a special significance for Packer. He was so captivated by a 2005 production of the fairy tale by Danish theatre company Gruppe 38, which he witnessed in Montreal, that it directly inspired him to establish his own children’s theatre company. When Gruppe 38 brought their production to Tasmania for the Ten Days on the Island festival in 2007, Packer eagerly took his nascent Slingsby creative team to Launceston to experience the show.
“Gruppe 38 makes work that speaks both to children and to adults in a very honest way,” Packer observes. “They don’t shy away from the darkness, which is what we as a company have sought to do as well. We don’t copy or try to reproduce what Gruppe 38 do; we make our own work in our own way, but we have a commitment to that honesty to young audiences, not to protect them but to prepare them for the world.”
An earlier attempt to adapt The Little Match Girl was unfortunately derailed by changes in funding. Now, the triptych, which includes The Tree of Light, is slated to be Slingsby’s final production. The theatre company is set to close its doors after once again failing to secure crucial federal government funding. This marks a poignant swansong to an era spanning two decades.
Packer describes The Little Match Girl as “a tough story.” He elaborates, “It’s a story where the world is very bleak for a child. Everywhere that central character looks, there is hardship. For me, what Hans Christian Andersen is asking us to consider is that the imagination can be a place that we retreat to. In a way, creativity and the imagination is another dimension where we can find joy and make peace with the world. That is what is happening for the Little Match Girl, even though the world is terrible when she sits and scratches those matches … The human capacity for imagining beautiful things is something that we should celebrate.”
Shooting for the Moon
The Tree of Light represents a radical reimagining of Andersen’s beloved tale. Packer presented Dovey with a single, concrete directive for her adaptation: set the story in the future. The writer embraced this challenge wholeheartedly, situating her narrative in a colony on the Moon in the year 3099. “The agreement was that we would have the freedom to adapt the story however we needed for the theatrical context, which gave us great freedom,” Packer states. “But, also, she gave us the perfect story to adapt.”
Despite the vastly different setting, Dovey’s version retains the profound emotional resonance of Andersen’s original. The character of the little match girl endures, but her benevolent grandmother has been transformed into a tree. “There is still the repeated image of the candle being lit and visions coming to that character that bring her peace and a sense of transitioning into something else, to another life,” Packer explains. “But we certainly don’t shy away from the fact that that central character dies; we witness that as we do in the original story.”
In true Slingsby fashion, the audience is actively integrated into the narrative from the outset. “We don’t want the audience to be sitting there passively. We want them to have a role in the show,” Packer insists. The audience finds themselves seated within a wooden structure, which they soon discover is the hollow trunk of the last remaining tree on the Moon, located in the Persephone colony. “They’re settlers of the colony, and that came from Ceridwen’s incredible description of what it would be like to live on the Moon, a lot of which was scientifically factual from her research,” Packer adds. At the time, Dovey was concurrently working on another project, her short story collection Only the Astronauts, which gave voice to a series of inanimate objects in space. Packer notes that these two projects mutually informed each other, stating, “It all came together so beautifully.”
A Gruesome End
The Tree of Light is not the sole Andersen adaptation currently gracing Australian stages. Cabaret performer Meow Meow is bringing her production of another of Andersen’s fairy tales, The Red Shoes, to the west coast for the Perth Festival in 2026. Meow Meow, the stage name of Melissa Madden Gray, has a history of adapting Andersen’s works, having previously staged The Little Match Girl in 2011 and The Little Mermaid in 2016. “I’m always so shocked by his vicious morality tales … I’m always trying to fix them,” she confessed to ABC Radio National’s The Music Show.
She contrasts Andersen’s work with that of Oscar Wilde, stating, “Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales are always so redolent and lush in their language; they’re poetic and I can really get swept away with those. It feels pungent with beauty. Hans Christian Andersen’s feel so much more dry and so much more instructional.”
The Red Shoes serves as a prime example. In the original fairy tale, a young woman named Karen becomes consumed by a pair of red shoes, wearing them even to church. A soldier curses her, condemning her to dance endlessly. “[Eventually] she begs an executioner in the woods to chop her feet off, [but] the little feet keep dancing,” Meow Meow recounts. “It’s absolutely gruesome; she has to be absolutely humbled. At the end, there’s no more vanity or desire … her heart breaks, and with that, she goes into heaven.”
Meow Meow’s interpretation injects a much-needed element of joy into the narrative, reconfiguring dance as a form of “cure” rather than a punishment. She finds it particularly curious that Andersen himself possessed a passion for dance and even auditioned for a ballet company as a teenager. “He’s usually the heroine in his stories,” she muses. “He is the mermaid, he is the ugly duckling, he is Karen, and, in a way, he is punishing himself for his own vanity, his own need, his own social climbing.”
Meow Meow believes Andersen’s works, layered with profound meaning, are exceptionally well-suited for modern interpretation. “The Red Shoes is really about greed, and that’s what we’re looking at in the world today … unfettered greed.”
The Tree of Light is showing at the Adelaide Festival until March 15.
Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes is showing at the Perth Festival until March 1.
