Getting Grim(m)er

Not contact with finding a home in the Graveyard at the Merchant City Festival, the young Glaswegian company Louna are gearing up to invade the Fringe with their adult version of fairy tales. Co-founder Anna Lehr chats about the genesis of the Louna and their plan to bring back the fantastic to the theatrical.

After having worked as an actress for ten years in my native country Germany, I came to the UK and started getting in touch with storytelling, also as part of museum education. I found the concept of storytelling fascinating but was disappointed that events concerning this medium were predominantly geared towards children.

Having always been fascinated by fairy tales, especially the original stories by the Brothers Grimm, I have long wanted to put them on stage for an adult audience but could never find the right opportunity. When I met Louisa Thornton who shared my passion for both the subject matter and the art form, we decided to form a company that combines the immediacy of storytelling with the staged elements of theatre.

Feedback has been very positive and people are surprised that they still enjoy fairytales so much! I think it is this element of surprise that is part of our success – some of the audience seem quite curious when they come to our shows. They know how 'storytelling' and 'fairy tales' should be told only to leave feeling rejuvinated by our particular style of storytelling - fast paced, raw and punchy!

We do not sanitise anything – as for example Disney do with a lot of traditional fairy tales– and always search for the most gruesome edition of the story and magnify the dark content of the tale for our adult audience.

We have realised that the storytelling experience, if done in the right way, is captivating for all ages, especially to an adult audience who might have forgotten how beautiful it is to be told a story and who secretly long for a more folkloristic approach within popular culture. In our over-technical entertainment world where everything is CGI, 3D and supersized, we take ourselves and our audience seriously and go back to basics – but never forgetting to keep our tongues firmly in cheek.

We are definitely a text based company – we both have a drama background, so the spoken word is essential for us and to our chosen medium of storytelling. However, we do use elements of physical theatre in order to create a stronger image on stage. Louna Productions consists of two people, we work with no backdrops and hardly any props – so our bodies are our medium, and we like to use them to full capacity in order to express what we want to get across. Movement and songs are embedded in our approach to story telling, so they are always part of our shows.

We were very keen to participate as part of the Merchant City Festival as we are hoping that this will make us known to a wider audience and we can prove that storytelling can happen everywhere – even in the graveyard of the Ramshorn Theatre!