The Tales of Beatrix Potter (Royal Ballet Film 1971)

In 1971, dancers from the Royal Ballet put on animal heads and brought the little books to life. The result was a film: the Tales of Beatrix Potter ballet, made the year before and released that spring. It was choreographed by Sir Frederick Ashton, the most famous British dance-maker of his day. He did something nobody had tried before. He took stories written for very small children and danced them — Jemima Puddle-Duck, Jeremy Fisher, the Two Bad Mice — without a single word.

It sounds like an odd idea. Ballet is grand. The little books are tiny. One is meant for the opera house; the other fits in a child's hand. Putting them together could have looked silly. Instead it became one of the best-loved screen versions of Potter ever made — and the part everyone remembers is Ashton himself, dancing the role of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.

This article is about that film: why ballet, how Ashton built it, the masks the dancers wore, and how closely the whole thing copies Beatrix Potter's own pictures.

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Why dance the little books at all?

By 1970 Beatrix Potter had been dead for nearly thirty years. Her books had never stopped selling. But the way people thought about her was changing. Her private journal had just been published, written in a secret code that took years to crack. New exhibitions of her work were drawing big crowds. She was being taken seriously again — not only as a writer for children, but as an artist.

A ballet fit that moment. It was a way to treat the little books as something grand, worth the stage of the Royal Opera House. It also suited the stories themselves. Potter's animals do not talk much. They act. Peter squeezes under the gate. Jemima waddles off to lay her eggs in the wrong place. Mr. Jeremy Fisher sets out fishing and gets a fright. These are tales of movement first — of a creature trying to do a thing, and the trouble it lands in. Take away the words and you still have the story in the body.

That is what made dance possible. You cannot easily dance an argument; you can dance a frog losing his footing on a lily leaf. The little books are full of exactly that kind of doing.

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Frederick Ashton's choreography

Sir Frederick Ashton (1904–1988) was the leading choreographer of the Royal Ballet. He had spent his life making dances that told a story through pure movement, and the little books gave him small, sharp stories to work with.

His first problem was the body. A dancer's whole training is built on the human line — the long leg, the lifted spine, the open arms. But a hedgehog is round and low. A frog crouches. A mouse scurries. Ashton had to bend classical ballet into the shape of animals without losing the dancing underneath. The trick was to keep the steps real ballet, then colour them with the way each creature moves. Jeremy Fisher's dance keeps the springy, off-balance feel of a frog. The mice in Two Bad Mice are quick and twitchy and small. Each animal gets its own way of moving, drawn from the way the real animal behaves and from the way Potter drew it.

The most talked-about choice was Ashton's own. He took the role of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, the hedgehog washerwoman, and danced it himself. He was in his sixties by then. He gave her a fussy, busy, house-proud little dance — all small steps and bustle, a creature forever at her ironing. It became the centre of the film. People who remember nothing else about the ballet remember Ashton as the hedgehog.

He picked the tales carefully, too. Not every little book would dance. The ones that work best on screen — Jemima Puddle-Duck, Mr. Jeremy Fisher, the Two Bad Mice, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, the Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, Squirrel Nutkin — are the ones with clear physical action and room for a set-piece dance. The talkiest, gentlest tales were left out.

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The masks and costumes

The first thing you notice is the heads. Every dancer wears a full animal mask — a real sculpted head, not face paint — with whiskers, ears, beaks and snouts. The costumes copy the clothes Potter put on her animals: Jeremy Fisher's neat coat, Jemima's shawl and poke bonnet, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle's print gown and apron.

These masks were a gamble. A mask hides the face, and a dancer's face is half of how they tell a story. Cover it, and everything has to be said by the body — the tilt of a head, the set of the shoulders, the hands. That is hard, and it could have killed the dancing stone dead. Instead it pushed the dancers to act with their whole bodies, which is exactly what the little books need. The masks also do one more thing: they turn living dancers into Potter's drawings come to life. From the audience, a dancer in a duck's head and a blue shawl simply is Jemima Puddle-Duck.

There is a remarkable thing about that choice: Beatrix Potter had imagined it herself, decades earlier. When Walt Disney proposed filming Peter Rabbit as a cartoon in the 1930s, she was doubtful — she did not believe her painted backgrounds would survive being blown up and stripped of colour on a cinema screen. "I think children with masks, acting the stories against a natural background would give more satisfaction," she wrote to an American friend. "I am not troubling myself about it!" The 1971 ballet did precisely that: masked figures, acting the stories, against painted natural scenes. She never saw it. It answered a wish she had set down in a letter more than thirty years before.

→ Read The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck

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How close is it to Potter's pictures?

Very close — and on purpose. The whole look of the film is built out of Beatrix Potter's own illustrations.

The costumes match her drawings almost detail for detail. The sets copy the worlds she painted: the farmyard, the pond with its lily leaves, the cosy kitchen with its dresser and its fire. When the camera frames a scene, it often looks like one of the book's plates set moving. The same colours. The same homely Victorian clutter. The same soft light. The people who made the film clearly went back to the books and worked from them, page by page.

This is the film's real achievement. A child who knows the books can watch the ballet and recognise scene after scene. The pictures they have looked at on the page are suddenly walking and dancing in front of them.

That faithfulness is also why the film has lasted. Plenty of screen versions of Beatrix Potter take her characters and do something new with them. This one does the opposite. It keeps as close to her own pictures as it can, and lets the dancing be the only thing that is added. Beatrix Potter cared deeply about how her books looked. She fought over the colour of a single plate. For a writer like that, this may be the most respectful version of all.

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The music and the making

The dances are set to music arranged by John Lanchbery. He built the score out of older British music — pieces by the Victorian composers Michael Balfe and Sir Arthur Sullivan, among others. The orchestra of the Royal Opera House played it. The music gives each animal its own tune, the way each one has its own dance.

The film ran about ninety minutes. The Tales of Beatrix Potter was made in 1970 and released in spring 1971, produced through EMI's Elstree studios and distributed by MGM. (In the United States it went out under the longer name Peter Rabbit and Tales of Beatrix Potter.) It rode the same wave of new attention that had brought her back into view, and Ashton himself was a guest at a Beatrix Potter exhibition in June 1971.

There is a nice footnote to all this. Leslie Linder, the collector who had cracked Potter's secret journal, gave Ashton an original Beatrix Potter drawing of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle to mark the making of the film — a small thank-you for the part Ashton danced. Ashton kept it for the rest of his life.

In 1992 the ballet moved from screen to stage, joining the live repertoire of the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, where it has been danced many times since.

If you want the rest of Beatrix Potter on screen, the family-film versions belong to a different age and a different spirit — see Peter Rabbit (2018) and its sequel. For the wider history of her tales as live theatre, see Beatrix Potter on Stage.