Rumpelstiltskin; Credit: © Sven Becker

The Grand Théâtre is putting on a production of "Rumpelstilzchen" this coming week-end, 15-17 December 2017.

The Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg have decided to revive a tradition going back a very long way, namely the adaptation for the theatre, in Luxembourgish (with surtitles in EN & FR), of a popular fairy tale; the writer Ian De Toffoli and the director Myriam Muller have thus decided to reinvent the story of Rumpelstiltskin.

Rumpelstiltskin is certainly one of the Brothers Grimm’s best-known stories, but also one of the shortest, with characters that are archetypically recognisable in terms of the functions they perform in the story-telling but lacking in any real psychological depth – which affords this rewritten version a great deal of scope for modulation.

What is involved, therefore, is an exercise in filling out this tale of betrayal and greed by illustrating hitherto little explored motives, and by using action and dialogue to fill in ellipses where, hitherto, there were things unmentioned and mere suppositions. Who is this Rumpelstiltskin, and why does he want to seize and take possession of the queen’s first-born child?

Ultimately, however, what this story of the relationship between a miller’s daughter and a supernatural creature boils down to, invariably and automatically, is the ancestral struggle between pride and the desire for security, between the thin mask of civilisation and the untamed forces harbored within each and every one of us, or – to use the current technical jargon – between creditors and debtors.

Performances:

- Fri 15 Dec @ 20:00

- Sat 16 Dec @ 20:00

- Sun 17 Dec @ 17:00

Tickets €15, €20, €25 from www.luxembourg-ticket.lu