Beatrix Potter on Stage: Theatrical Adaptations Through the Decades

The little books were made to be held in a small hand. They are quiet things — soft colours, short sentences, a story you can read before sleep. So it is a strange thought: Beatrix Potter on stage, her rabbits and ducks brought to life by living people in front of a crowd. Yet it has happened, on and off, for a hundred years. The first attempt came in her own lifetime, and she helped write it. The grandest version dances at the Royal Opera House.

This is the story of her tales as live theatre. Not the screen versions, but the stage ones — the plays, the children's performances, and above all the Royal Ballet's Tales of Beatrix Potter. That work moved from a 1971 film to the live stage at Covent Garden in 1992, and has been danced there many times since. Along the way we will ask the simple question underneath all of it. What does a theatre give the little books that a book, or a screen, cannot?

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A Christmas play she helped write

The first time her stories reached a stage, Beatrix Potter was sixty years old and living in the Lake District. She was a farmer by then, not really an author. The request came to her through her publisher in October 1923.

A man named E. Harcourt Williams wrote to Frederick Warne. He was the husband of Jean Sterling Mackinlay, who put on children's performances for several weeks each Christmas. He had made a rough draft of a play out of The Tailor of Gloucester, and he wanted permission to use it.

Potter was charmed. The Tailor was her own favourite of all the books — she said so plainly. "I care far more for the Tailor than for Peter," she told Warne. But charmed did not mean satisfied. She read the draft with a sharp eye, and she had conditions.

The words, she said, needed work. "They have worked in slabs of my text," she wrote, "tacked together by pieces of their own words; good, poor, and absolute twaddle!" She offered to fix it herself. Often, she pointed out, the cure was small. "The mere position of a word makes all the difference in the balance of a sentence."

She went after the details. The mice had been given silly names — one was called Lady Golightly, which she thought sounded like an old racehorse. She wanted the Tailor to hear "little twittering voices" before he spoke to the mice, not to "have an idea" afterwards. And she fussed over a stage direction that sent the mice away to clean themselves up like children. Mice, she noted, "have fur, not hair." Send them back for thimbles instead.

Harcourt Williams took most of her notes. After a long exchange of letters, the play was put on at Steinway Hall in London, where The Tailor of Gloucester ran for four weeks. The script itself was finally published in 1930.

This first stage venture tells you something about Potter and the theatre. She did not hold the books precious and untouchable. She let them be cut and rearranged for the stage. What she would not allow was bad writing in her name. "If they print a book of words," she warned, "I must be allowed to revise it."

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More plays in her lifetime — and the ones she started herself

The Tailor was not the only tale to reach a stage while she lived.

Harcourt Williams went on to make a dramatised version of Ginger and Pickles, published in 1931. Two years later, in 1933, a stage version of Mr. Samuel Whiskers, also known as The Roly-Poly Pudding, was published, this one adapted by Theron H. Butterworth. The little books were slowly becoming theatre.

What is less well known is that Beatrix Potter wrote for the stage herself. She began a Peter Rabbit play but never finished it. The opening survives, and it reads exactly like her — practical, funny, full of stage business. Mrs. Rabbit is to be played by a grown-up acting as scene director, in a print dress and a large apron, with a fluffy tail pinned to her waistband and her back stuffed out with a pillow into a comic hump. Then a "dance of vegetables" comes on, two by two: little girls in green paper leaves, little boys dressed as pears and beans and parsley, each waving a real vegetable or a stick.

There was a Squirrel Nutkin play of her own making too. That one had a longer life than she ever saw. She had given a copy to Christopher Le Fleming, who had set music to her Peter Rabbit Music Books. She told him he was welcome to add music and publish it one day. He did — in 1967, long after her death, the play came out as a children's play adapted by Beatrix Potter, with music drawn from traditional tunes.

So the stage was not something done to Beatrix Potter against her will. She took part. She corrected other people's scripts, started two plays of her own, and left one for someone else to finish. The theatre and the little books had a longer, friendlier history than most people know.

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The Royal Ballet's Tales of Beatrix Potter — from screen to stage

The grandest version of all began as a film.

In 1971, the Royal Ballet made a film called Tales of Beatrix Potter. Dancers wore full animal masks and danced the stories without a word, to a score arranged from old British music. It was choreographed by Sir Frederick Ashton, the leading British dance-maker of his day, who took the part of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle himself. We have written about that film, the masks, and how faithfully it copies Potter's own pictures in a separate piece.

→ For the choreography, the masks, and the fidelity to her drawings, see our piece on The Tales of Beatrix Potter (Royal Ballet Film 1971).

The part that belongs here is what happened next. In 1992, the work crossed over from the screen to the live stage. The dance entered the Royal Ballet's own repertoire and was performed live at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in London. In that 1992 production, the dancer Iain Webb took on the role Ashton had once danced — Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, the hedgehog washerwoman. The film had become a thing you could buy a ticket to and watch breathing in front of you.

That move, from screen to stage, gave the work a second life. And it raised a fair question, which the next part of this story answers: a much-loved film already existed, so why bother putting the ballet back in front of a live crowd at all?

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Why move it to the stage at all?

Live, the appeal is simple. A dancer in a hedgehog's head is really there, a few rows away, breathing and balancing; the creature on the page has stepped into the room, and an orchestra plays the score live instead of through a speaker. For many children it is their first time inside a great theatre at all.

It also found a natural home in the calendar. Like The Nutcracker, Tales of Beatrix Potter became festive-season programming — short, full of comic animals, built from books most families already know. That makes it a near-perfect first ballet, and the reason it keeps coming back: the plot needs no programme notes. You knew Jemima Puddle-Duck and Mr. Jeremy Fisher before you sat down, and when they appear on stage you greet them like old friends.

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See the 1992 ballet on stage

A few glimpses of the Royal Ballet's Tales of Beatrix Potter as it lives now — danced live at Covent Garden.

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The wider stage — and what we leave out

Beatrix Potter has reached the theatre in other ways too. Judy Taylor, one of her biographers, records that her work has been turned into plays for the theatre and the radio, and into one-woman shows about her life. The little books have long been popular with children's theatre groups, who find in them exactly what Ashton found: clear, physical stories that a child can follow without reading a word.

A note of honesty belongs here. The history of Beatrix Potter on stage is not well documented. Her biographers were interested in her life, her art, and her farming, not in every Christmas pantomime or village production that borrowed her characters. Many small stage shows of the tales have surely come and gone without leaving a trace in the books. Where we cannot confirm a production — its name, its company, its year — we have left it out rather than guess. The stage history set down here is the part that is recorded and certain.

What is certain is the shape of the thing. It began with a sixty-year-old farmer in the Lake District, blue pencil in hand, fixing the words of a Christmas play. It runs through her own half-written scripts and the plays published in her lifetime. And it rises to the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, where, every so often, the curtain still goes up on a stage full of dancing rabbits — and a child somewhere in the dark sees a book come alive.