MULTI-AWARD winning dance theatre company balletLORENT will head to Darlington Hippodrome later this month as part of a 2020 national tour with a brand new fairytale The Lost Happy Endings, an original story by former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, retold as dance theatre for family.

Directed and choreographed by balletLORENT’s Artistic Director Liv Lorent, with narration by Joanna Lumley, this new fairytale follows the award winning and critically acclaimed Rapunzel (2012-2014), Snow White (2015-2016), and Rumpelstiltskin (2017-2018).

“Both as a poet and as a parent I’ve always loved revisiting and retelling our traditional myths and fairytales. As we have developed the story, we found we weren’t only dealing with the Lost Happy Endings, but also the alternative middles," says Carol Ann Duffy.

Liv Lorent has reunited with some of her other world-renowned collaborators who created Rapunzel, Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin – composer Murray Gold, dramaturg Ben Crompton, and lighting designers Malcolm Rippeth and Michael Morgan. New collaborators set designer Neil Murray and fashion and costume designer Nasir Mazhar have joined for this production.

The Lost Happy Endings is a story about a magical girl called Jub who lives deep in the forest and has six fingers on each hand. Her job is to guard the happy endings to stories and fairytales. But one day an otherworldly Witch steals them, and at bedtime the stories are destroyed.

Liv says: “The Lost Happy Endings is our most topical work to date with light, darkness and humour. We see children’s fury when the happy endings of their stories are stolen from them, and we see our main character Jub, make it her job to rewrite fairytales to give the characters an ending that they deserve.”

The professional company will be joined on stage by a community cast of children aged six to 11 years, some of which have performed with balletLORENT in the fairytale trilogy, and some of which are local children who have been selected from Firthmoor Primary School.

“The children in our work continue to be the heart of the story. It is their distress and anger, and also their hope and creativity as they charge forward with their imagination that feeds our grown-up hearts with emotion and renews our energy for all the good in the world that is worth fighting for,” says Liv.

  • The Lost Happy Endings runs at Darlington Hippodrome on Saturday, February 22 at 7.30pm and Sunday, February 23 at 2.30pm. For more information or to book call 01325 405405 or visit www.darlingtonhippodrome.co.uk