Aesop's Fables - Dramatised Fables

Dramatised Fables

The success of La Fontaine's fables in France started a European fashion for creating plays around them. The originator was Edmé Boursault, with his five-act verse drama Les Fables d'Esope (1690), later retitled Esope à la ville (Aesop in town). Such was its popularity that a rival theatre produced Eustache Le Noble's Arlaquin-Esope in the following year. Boursault then wrote a sequel, Esope à la cour (Aesop at court), a heroic comedy that was held up by the censors and not produced until after his death in 1701. Some forty years later Charles Stephen Pesselier wrote two one-act pieces, Esope au Parnasse and Esope du temps.

Esope à la ville was written in alexandrine couplets and depicted a physically ugly Aesop acting as adviser to Learchus, governor of Cyzicus under King Croesus, and using his fables to solve romantic problems and quiet political unrest. One of the problems is personal to Aesop, since he is betrothed to the governor's daughter, who detests him and has a young admirer with whom she is in love. There is very little action, the play serving as a platform for the recitation of free verse fables at frequent intervals. These include The Fox and the Weasel, The Fox and the Mask, The Nightingale, The Belly and the Other Members, the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, the Lark and the Butterfly, the Fox and the Crow, the Crab and her Daughter, the Frog and the Ox, the Cook and the Swan, the Doves and the Vulture, the Wolf and the Lamb, the Mountain in Labour, and The Man with two Mistresses.

Esope à la cour is more of a moral satire, most scenes being set pieces for the application of fables to moral problems, but to supply romantic interest Aesop's mistress Rhodope is introduced. Among the sixteen fables included, some four derive from La Fontaine - the Heron, the Lion and the Mouse, the Dove and the Ant, the Sick Lion, - a fifth borrows a moral from another of his but alters the details, and a sixth has as apologue a maxim of Antoine de La Rochefoucauld. After a modest few performances, the piece later grew in popularity and remained in the repertory until 1817. Boursault's play was also influential in Italy and twice translated. It appeared from Bologna in 1719 under the title L’Esopo in Corte, translated by Antonio Zaniboni, and as Le Favole di Esopa alla Corte from Venice in 1747, translated by Gasparo Gozzi. The same translator was responsible for a version of Esope à la ville (Esopo in città, Venice, 1748); then in 1798 there was an anonymous Venetian three-act adaptation, Le Favole di Esopa, ossia Esopo in città. In England the play was adapted under the title Aesop by John Vanbrugh and first performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London in 1697, remaining popular for the next twenty years.

In the 20th century individual fables by Aesop began to be adapted to animated cartoons, most notably in France and the United States. Cartoonist Paul Terry began his own series, called Aesop's Film Fables, in 1921 but by the time this was taken over by Van Beuren Studios in 1928 the story lines had little connection with any fable of Aesop's. In the early 1960s, animator Jay Ward created a television series of short cartoons called Aesop and Son which were first aired as part of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Actual fables were spoofed to result in a pun based on the original moral. Two fables are also featured in the 1971 TV movie Aesop’s Fables in the U.S.A. Here Aesop is a black story teller who relates two turtle fables, The Tortoise and the Eagle and the Tortoise and the Hare to a couple of children who wander into an enchanted grove. The fables themselves are shown as cartoons.

Between 1989 and 1991, fifty Aesop-based fables were reinterpreted on French television as Les Fables géométriques and later issued on DVD. These featured a cartoon in which the characters appeared as an assembly of animated geometric shapes, accompanied by Pierre Perret's slang versions of La Fontaine's original poem. In 1983 there was an extended manga version of the fables made in Japan, Isoppu monogatari, and there has also been a Chinese television series for children based on the stories.

There have also been several dramatic productions for children based on elements of Aesop's life and including the telling of some fables, although most were written as purely local entertainments. Among these was Canadian writer Robertson Davies' A Masque of Aesop (1952), which was set at his trial in Delphi and allows the defendant to tell the fables The Belly and the Members, The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse and The Cock and the Jewel while challenging prevailing social attitudes. Another example is the musical Aesop's Fables by British playwright Peter Terson, first produced in 1983. What lifted this work into another class was Mark Dornford-May's adaptation for the Isango Portobello company at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2010. The play tells the story of the black slave Aesop, who learns that freedom is earned and kept through being responsible. His teachers are the animal characters he meets on his journeys. The fables they suggest include The Tortoise and the Hare, the Lion and the Goat, the Wolf and the Crane, the Frogs Who Desired a King and three others, brought to life through a musical score featuring mostly marimbas, vocals and percussion. Another colourful treatment was Brian Seward's Aesop’s Fabulous Fables (2009) in Singapore, which mixes a typical musical with Chinese dramatic techniques.