Theatre company impresario and educator Alys Kihl, founder of Wonderful Beast, loves a good story. The Aldeburgh resident understands exactly how a good yarn can bewitch and entrance people of all ages.
She knows that stories – both old and new – are a wonderful way of drawing communities together, creating bonds, and allowing generations to mix and share an experience - as demonstrated earlier this summer by an open-air performance at Thorington Theatre near Southwold.
Alys points out that her work with Wonderful Beast celebrates the fact that storytelling is a global tradition. It’s a basic human need to gather around the metaphorical camp fire and share tales about who we are as people, our traditions, our beliefs, our history, she says. Of course, that changes over time. Society evolves, but stories allow us to move forward while remaining connected to our roots.
Also, tales are not just conveyed verbally. Alys reflects the variety of timeless traditions of storytelling in her shows by mixing words with music, singing, circus skills, dance and puppetry. “Music has always been very important to me. One of things that I am most proud of with Wonderful Beast is a collaboration we did with English Touring Opera,” she says.
“We did a series of workshops and performances with ETO, working with 30 primary schools throughout Suffolk. That was very special.”
The work of Wonderful Beast often takes on an international flavour as Alys, living on the coast, is well aware of Suffolk and Norfolk’s long history trading history with Europe. Fishermen, sailors and merchants regularly met their European counterparts and swapped stories in quayside taverns over a pint of beer.
“People are amazed when you introduce a classic folk-tale or fairytale as a German or French story because they regard it as something typically English. It’s part of our traditional heritage, but it’s part of French, German, Italian and Swiss heritage too – along with people from Scandinavia and eastern Europe.
“The reason these stories spread so far and wide is because the storytellers were itinerant. They travelled across the countryside, also from country to country, making their living by entertaining crowds on market day, on feast days and in the ale houses at night.
“They knew how to spin a good yarn, how to put over a good story, and very often there would be rival storytellers in the crowd, looking to pick up new material that they could refashion to enhance their own acts.
“In the early days none of these stories would have been written down. It was an oral tradition, and as these wandering troubadours went from town to town they would elaborate the stories for their audiences over time. Likewise, as other storytellers borrowed the tales, they too would make them their own and rather like Chinese Whispers the stories would vary and evolve in the telling.
“We have encountered different versions of Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty right across Europe some extremely gruesome and in the case of the Italians some incredibly bawdy.
“In fact, I would love to do at some point an age-restricted evening of Italian folk-tales which I think people would find extremely fun.”
Alys has forged strong relationships with local writers like Jon Canter and Thea Smiley. “Thea wrote both Return of the Wildman – a new take about the Wildman of Orford which we toured and performed at Orford Castle – and The Last Woodwose, which premiered in 2017 at the Hightide Festival before touring woodlands and churches.”
For many years, prior to the arrival Covid and the resulting lockdowns, Alys ran the Storm of Stories Festival in Aldeburgh which involved schools, community groups and residents of care homes and sheltered housing.
Storytellers, musicians and dancers from nearby, and around the world, convened on the town for a weekend of performances and workshops around a central theme including ‘memories’ and ‘the sea’.
For Alys, founding the community choir and creating workshops with schools in north Suffolk provided some of the most rewarding moments of the last 25 years – a chance to give back to the places that inspired her creativity as a young child.
“I think that I took a lot from Benjamin Britten’s example – his desire to involve the community in the Aldeburgh Festival right from the start.”
Alys also benefitted from piano lessons with Imogen Holst, Britten’s long-time collaborator and daughter of Gustav Holst, composer of the Planets Suite. The young Alys was friendly with Benjamin Britten's nieces and nephew, who were taught by Imogen. Alys popped along for a visit when a lesson was taking place; Holst asked her to play something, and then offered to teach her, too.
“Imogen Holst was the greatest inspiration in my life. Definitely. She was incredibly enthusiastic about everything, and the most encouraging teacher you could have. She always praised to start with, and only then said 'But…’ So one always felt one was moving forward and was confident and enjoying it.
“I used to learn Schubert waltzes and she'd get so excited she'd dance all the way around the dining room table, and say 'You're a musician! You're a musician!'.
“She didn't come on a regular basis; she'd ring up and say 'I can give you a lesson for half an hour' - she'd be working for Ben or writing a book about her father or something - and she'd come blowing in in her sou’westers and oilskins in an east-wind gale, and sit down and teach.”
Alys knew Benjamin Britten well, too. “He would go to parties, and he took us to The Prince of the Pagodas in London - his ballet. He was a wonderfully warm, lovely man. Absolutely adorable.”
Before coming to Suffolk, Alys spent a short time in Yorkshire “which was a decision my mother made: to bring up her two children here, because she was divorced. She came for many reasons, one of which was the festival; because she was musical.”
After leaving Leiston Grammar School at 16, Alys studied music at Dartington College in Devon and went on to the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London.
“I left before the end, for one reason or another,” she smiles. “I was just gadding about . . . Just had enough of it. I went a bit wild! I got married very young and had children, and then became a schoolteacher at William Tyndale Primary School in Islington.
“We had a fantastic, enlightened head who believed in education through the arts, and I did a lot of music and a lot of drama.”
After the head left, Alys also decided on a change and went freelance, doing a lot of music-based work in schools before founding Wonderful Beast. The name was adapted from a term used by Marina Warner in her book From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, “which I thought was a great name for the company,” says Alys. “Beasts can be wonderful. In Beauty and the Beast for example - he turned out alright in the end, didn't he?”
Alys's road to Damascus moment came at the Young Vic in London when she witnessed Tim Supple's contemporary take on the Grimm fairytales.
“He didn't play down to the children. It was never terrifying, but it was pretty grisly at times. For example, he found a way of Cinderella's ugly sisters having their eyes pecked out by ravens: he did it with ping-pong balls. He really went for the dark side as well as the funny aspects - and that's what I love.
“We all know about being jealous. And children, particularly, have these strong feelings of being angry, of loneliness, fears of being vulnerable, terrified of being left alone. All those things are in the stories. If you pretend they're not there, you're not really helping anybody.
“You don't have to overdo the dark side, but you can't pretend it's not there.”
From that moment it was clear what she wanted to do with her life: to run a company that brought stories not just to children but also to adults.
“Fairytales can, on the face of it, seem quite superficial, but I believe these stories are equally valuable for the youngest and oldest listeners. Before they were written down, they were tales people told to each other to pass the time, to enlighten, to heal, to frighten, to warn, to satirise, or simply to entertain.
“These tales will always be relevant to us and we must not lose them, because they are about who we are. They pinpoint our fears, dreams and longings, and capture every aspect of human nature.
“They are of tremendous value for children, helping them to make sense of their lives and to recognise they are not alone. That other people have dark and frightening feelings just like them, and like the characters in these stories, they can emerge from their own inner battles and journeys feeling safer and more in control.”
This was 25 years ago and shortly after establishing the Wonderful Beast, Alys returned to her childhood home in Aldeburgh. Her mother, Molly, had stayed there, continuing to run her B&B for musicians performing at the Aldeburgh Festival and the Snape Proms.
“In her 80s she was still having musicians staying with her. She had all the early stories of the Aldeburgh Festival to tell them, and they loved that, and she heard all the gossip about what was going on.”
Alys and writer husband Claude brought Wonderful Beast with them. Now, after the trials and tribulations of lockdown Alys feels that the 25th anniversary celebrations are a good point to start winding down.
“After two-and-a-half decades of mounting productions, touring nationally, staging our own Storm of Stories festivals, producing community operas, running storytelling and outreach projects for all ages, we feel the time has come to do things a little differently. We are not going away as such but I need to take things a little easier.
“Wonderful Beast will no longer be a charity but become a sole trader from January 2023. We will become a creative hub, a consultancy for anyone who wants to use us. Over the years I have amassed a huge archive of material and experience. So, from next year I hope we shall be used as a rich and invaluable resource for schools, arts organisations, individuals, writers, composers, and performers, as well as a facility for providing practitioners on request for specific projects.”
Before that, to mark their 25th birthday, Wonderful Beast is putting together a celebratory show on Sunday, November 27 at Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall, bringing together many of the artists who have performed with the company in the past.
“It will be a journey through some of the most magical moments of Wonderful Beast’s quarter century and sees some of our longest-standing artists contributing, including loyal patrons Dame Penelope Wilton and Gemma Jones, alongside many more great talents.”
Tickets for show will be made available shortly. More details will be announced at wonderfulbeast.co.uk.
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