Rediscovering Cinderella
Sudbury Hall, with giant storybook created by WELLIES, introducing visitors to Once Upon A Time …
At an end of year gathering for the National Trust’s Children and Young People Hubs of which The Children’s Country House (CCH) at Sudbury is an active member, we were asked what was our work highlight of 2024?
It is always good to discover the range of YP work that takes place across the Trust, but for my example, I had no hesitation in describing our CCH work in presenting a new Christmas Once Upon a Time … offer at the property, and in particular the exhibition we created entitled A Worldwide Cinderella.
In planning for Christmas at CCH I wanted to create a specific theme that we could creatively play with, market effectively and establish and develop further over future years. I was particularly inspired by a visit to Hardwick Hall in 2023 and seeing their first year of Wintertide, a Christmas offer inspired by the property’s Elizabethan history and the world of the Lord of Misrule.
Hardwick’s aim was to build this Wintertide world for subsequent years, providing both continuity and development of that theme for visitors. It also offered a more sustainable and economically manageable means of providing a great Christmas offer, without starting afresh each time.
Taking a similar approach, we created Once Upon A Time … as our festive theme at CCH. With a focus on storytelling and classic tales associated with the festive season, we would imaginatively use our spaces in Sudbury Hall, the Museum of Childhood, and the grounds, to creatively tell a well-known, magical story.
Cinderella was quickly chosen as our initial tale for Christmas 2024. It’s upstairs/downstairs elements, plus a preponderance of clocks, pumpkins, mischievous mice, and glass slippers meant that we could have these motifs running throughout our spaces.
To realise this, we partnered with Nottingham based HandMade Theatre and WELLIES, a therapeutic project based in Derbyshire. From initial storyboards, spaces were designed to tell different aspects of the Cinderella story. These included our Saloon as the space for Cinderella at the ball and her downstairs life in our kitchen.
Saloon at Sudbury Hall, with Cinderella ball dress, constructed from paper.
The design was enhanced with old books and music scores being sourced to create the various props, wigs and costumes that adorned the rooms. These were created by a team of crafting volunteers, students from Nottingham Trent University Theatre Design Department and the skills and talent of HandMade. Not only did this produce a hand-crafted detailed design, but a model of sustainability that aligns with the National Trust’s own values and would now inform the development of our future Christmas offer.
The Great Hall at Sudbury, introducing visitors to Cinderella characters at the festive dining table. Elaborate paper wigs made by theatre design students at Nottingham Trent University.
However, if we were to tell the Cinderella story across our spaces, there had to be acknowledgment that this world of pumpkins and magical mice was simply one version of this story and that in fact this tale spanned different countries and cultures.
The Disneyfied story we all know as Cinderella derives from French writer Charles Perrault’s version from 1697. It was Perrault who introduced the pumpkin coach, clocks striking midnight, the Fairy Godmother, the mice-coachmen, and the glass slippers.
Sudbury Hall was built from 1660 and so Perrault’s Cinderella is an accurate historical fit for our Christmas offer, but Perrault based his Cinderella on the countless other versions that preceded him.
The story about an impoverished young girl, suddenly blessed by magic and good fortune that we know as Cinderella is thousands of years old. The oldest is believed to date back to around 7BC, and concerns the Greek slave girl Rhodopis, toiling in Egypt, when whilst bathing in the Nile has one of her sandals snatched by an eagle that flies away and drops it into the lap of the Pharoah. I think you can guess the rest of the story.
There are versions of this classic rags to riches story told all around the world and we have tried to reflect this at Sudbury.
Designed by Molly Williams, a trained designer and one of our young CCH volunteers, we created A Worldwide Cinderella, a room dedicated to those global stories in our Museum of Childhood Project Gallery space.
We were particularly inspired by the children’s book Glass Slipper, Gold Sandal by Paul Fleishmann, published in 2007.
Fleishmann merges different versions of Cinderella, from countries such as Japan, Ireland, Mexico, and Zimbabwe into one seamless tale. His introduction sets the tone for the book and our exhibition …
“A chameleon changes colour to match its surroundings. Stories do the same … Travelling across the globe, Cinderella changed its clothes but not its essence. Rivalry, injustice, and the dream of wrongs righted are universal, no matter our garments. More than a thousand other versions are known … let us listen in on the tale-tellers we don’t often hear, who've breathed this story to life around fires of peat and pinon pine, swinging in hammocks and snuggling under deerskins.”
Our space offered opportunities for families to read the Chinese and Korean versions of Cinderella, as well as modern retellings such as the role-reversal Prince Cinders and Interstellar Cinderella, in which the independent title character chooses to become a rocket engineer for the Prince, rather than marrying him.
For a closer and more authentic understanding of the global resonance of Cinderella, we worked with Lichfield City of Sanctuary and children and families from Ukraine, Syria, and Afghanistan to explore these differing stories and to exhibit their own artwork based on Cinderella.
As their website states City of Sanctuary is “a national movement working to make the UK a welcoming place of safety for all,” supporting “a culture of welcome and hospitality to everyone.”
For this project we didn’t want this to be a tokenistic partnership with these refugee families, but to have significant depth and meaning for all those involved. After all, the Cinderella story is one of separation, division, and a strength to carry on.
After initially reaching out to the group during late summer 2024, I presented the project to the group’s committee in Lichfield. This was followed up with a visit to the families at one of their art sessions, alongside one of our CCH storytellers, who presented the Glass Slipper, Gold Sandal multi-cultural version of the story to the group.
In November, we were rewarded by a visit from some of the families with their Cinderella based artwork. Encompassing Ukrainian themes and motifs and hand stitched Syrian children’s dresses, the group had created for us a heart-felt response to our Cinderella request, which our Collections team then professionally displayed in this space.
Main display case of Worldwide Cinderella exhibition in Museum of Childhood at Sudbury, featuring artwork from families supported by Lichfield City of Sanctuary.
As an additional activity in the space, our designer Molly constructed a basic dress on a mannequin for children visiting the exhibition to create their own responses to Cinderella and to attach to the dress. This has been enormously popular, with responses including the child who wanted to see a Cinderella with a prosthetic arm, “so that children with limb differences could see princesses who look like them.”
Artwork created by visitor in Worldwide Cinderella exhibition space and added to Cinderella story dress.
If I’m honest, in my many years of programming and producing community projects, I have never really felt comfortable with sharing what I and the respective team have done. I’ve often just let the work speak for itself, whatever the reaction. However, this Cinderella work feels different, through the inspiration of others and its future potential. It is something that I want to shout about.
With Once Upon A Time …, I believe we have created a festive theme for CCH that is attractive to visitors and enables rich, creative collaborations, that can explore all aspects of a given story. At its core is a sustainable model for Christmas, run in partnership with arts practitioners and drawing on the skills of the local community. Who knows what story we will now tell in 2025?
The Worldwide Cinderella exhibition has given real depth to all that work. Rediscovering the Cinderella tale has been fascinating. It shows how stories can reveal new worlds and cultures, as well as highlighting how in many ways we are all simply the same.
It is often said that Christmas is a time for reflection. Then perhaps it is through stories like Cinderella during the festive season and actively engaging with others in their retelling and their re-interpretation, that we can truly understand one another.
