WHY is it that fairy tales are always described as timeless? It is just because they are just as relevant to every new generation of children, as Chippenham-born writer and actor Florence Espeut-Nickless discovered when she was preparing the Bristol Old Vic Weston Studio Christmas show, Little Red and Other Winter Tales.

Florence, the “writer in the room”, took Little Red Riding Hood (best known versions by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grim), and The Little Match Girl and The Red Shoes, both by Hans Christian Andersen, and worked with three actors and director Lisa Gregan to create a show about three young friends in Bristol and the games they play telling favourite stories.

It’s a show for young children and their families, on in beautifully-decorated the studio space until 12th January.

The actors are Bristol’s own Sasha Frost, whose stage life started as a member of Bristol Old Vic Young Company and has continued into television, film and Somerset playwright Nell Leyshon’s award winning Folk at London’s Hampstead Theatre, with actor, composer and musician Guy Hughes and Jenny Flynn, both familiar faces from the Handlebards and Wardrobe Theatre.

The retellings cleverly interweave the essentials of the traditional stories with entirely possible events from the 2020s – something that the children in the packed audience evidently appreciated and understood immediately. With simple, colourful props and delightful and delicate paper cutouts around the auditorium and on the stage, with shadow-play, light and fire, dancing, peculiar goings-on inside a vulpine stomach, and much more, this is a show to entertain young theatregoers and their parents and friends, told with huge skill and energy.

It’s a perfect introduction to live theatre, with all the expectation and excitement of the famous stories, and an example of how the more it changes, the more it stays the same.

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