Fred's Fairy Dell Saturday, 17th January 2004
He has a pink-with-gold-spots fly agaric toadstool to sit on, in the centre of the scene. My first thought as to how to paint the backdrop was that fairies are associated with life and growth. I thought of Richard Dadd's Victorian vision The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke (1855-64) set amongst the grasses on an intensely observed patch of the woodland floor. Too sinsister. And I thought of Shakespeare's:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Act ii. Sc. 1. No, that's going to be a bit too botanical and, away from my computer and books, I can't think what sort of plant eglantine is. I start sketching the tendrils and fruits (above) but realise this is going to be too fussy. The design runs across a screen of four 8 ft flats. I need some structure. Old Oak
With A Midsummer Night's Dream at the back of my mind it seems obvious that the structure in a woodland scene would be provided by a tree. As Treebeard the Ent has recently appeared in The Lord of the Rings movies perhaps the audience could accept that a tree could be a friendly familiar of a fairy, not a scary haunted old oak. But, no, it has too much of a Halloween look to it.
So this is more or less how it turned out: a kind
of bower, bedecked with buttercups and bluebells (there's a Fairy
Buttercup and a Fairy Bluebell in the story) and some giant-sized
purple agarics as bookends, framing the central one. That should
hint at the sort of mass-hallucigenic sort of evening of entertainment
the audience should expect . . .
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The
first scene I've to paint for our local amateur production of Snow
White is the opening one: a fairy dell. In fact, thanks to
a slight twist in the old tradition of pantomime, the fairy is played
by Fred, in a pink dress, complete with wings. But magic is magic
and we want this scene to get people into a mood where they suspend
disbelief for the evening. With Fred in his pink dress, that's going
to take some doing.
