POLLY Teale's bold re-imagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale of love, loss and desire, The Little Mermaid, visits Yorkshire this week for a four-day run at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

Adapted and directed by Teale, with sound and music by Jon Nicholls, this Shared Experience and Nottingham Playhouse Theatre Company co-production will play the Courtyard Theatre from tonight until Saturday.

Teale's company Shared Experience are noted for their imaginative and physical adaptations of literary classics and this world premiere of Mermaid is no different.

Writer-director Teale plunders Andersen's haunting tale for its dark, erotic, mythic power, transporting the story to a contemporary setting designed by Tom Piper.

If his name rings a bell, it was Piper who co-designed the installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies, Blood Swept Lands and Seas Of Red Tower, at the Tower of London with Paul Cummins, in commemoration of the First World War. He is also the associate designer of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Teale notes the resonance of Mermaid "in an age of Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, where we are constantly looking at our own reflections".

"As women obsess about calories and totter around in six-inch heels to make themselves appear thinner, the Mermaid’s story speaks of the extreme lengths women will go to alter themselves to win approval," she says.

Her cast is led by Natalie Gavin as The Girl, on her return to Yorkshire after portraying a young Andrea Dunbar in The Arbor, Clio Barnard's 2010 film about the late Bradford playwright and screenwriter, best known for Rita, Sue And Bob Too.

Shared Experience are running a participatory project around Mermaid, open to female singers aged 14 to 20. In each city on the tour, including Leeds, the company is recruiting a chorus of young women to perform on stage, creating the sound of the Mermaid’s singing.

Mermaid is the latest addition to the credits list of Polly Teale, an award-winning theatre practitioner who has been joint artistic director of Shared Experience since 1995. She has written original plays and stage adaptations aplenty, among them her 1997 adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre.

After Mrs Rochester, her original play about the author Jean Rhys being locked in a room with Bronte’s mythical mad woman, won her the Evening Standard Award for Best Director and the Time Out Award for Best West End Production. She is now working as director on a feature film based on the Brontes.


Mermaid is on tour at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, from tonight until Saturday at 7.45pm nightly plus matinees at 1.45pm tomorrow and 2.30pm, Saturday. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or at wyp.org.uk