The Town Mouse and The Country Mouse - Later Adaptations

Later Adaptations

Beatrix Potter retold the story in The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse (1918). In this she inverted the order of the visits, with the country mouse going to the city first, being frightened by a cat and disliking the food. Returning the visit later, the town mouse is frightened of the rain, the lawnmower and the danger of being stepped on by cows. The story concludes with the reflection that tastes differ. A segment from the tale was incorporated into the children's ballet film The Tales of Beatrix Potter, danced by the Royal Ballet with choreography by Frederick Ashton (1971). The ballet was subsequently performed onstage in 1992 and 2007.

In 1927 the story was made into a French silent film, with puppet animation by the director Wladyslaw Starewicz, under the title Le Rat de Ville et le Rat des Champs. In this updated version, the urban rat drives out of Paris in his car to visit his cousin on the farm. They return to the city and visit a nightclub but their revels end in pandemonium with the arrival of a cat. Recognizing that city life is too hectic for him, the country rat prefers to dream of his urban adventure from the safety of his home. The American equivalent was the Silly Symphonies cartoon The Country Cousin (1936), in which the country mouse hikes along the railroad track to visit his cousin in the city. The main action takes place on the supper table and is governed by the unexplained need for silence. When the reason for this is revealed as the cat, the cousin escapes into the street, only to face the worse hazards of the traffic.

In 1980, the fable was whimsically adapted by Evelyn Lambart for the National Film Board of Canada using paper figures and brightly coloured backgrounds. Other cartoons much more loosely based on the fables have included Mouse in Manhattan (1945) and The Country Mouse and the City Mouse: A Christmas Tale (HBO 1993), which eventually led to the TV series of The Country Mouse and the City Mouse Adventures.

In the UK, Vicky Ireland dramatised the fable for Merseyside Young People's Theatre in 1987. The 80-minute play has since been acted in the USA, South Africa and New Zealand. It features William Boot, a country mouse bored with rural life at his grandmother's house, who is visited by his city cousin and learns that he has inherited Tallyhoe Lodge in London. They leave to run a gauntlet of adventures, from which William returns to settle gratefully in his peaceful country retreat.

Among musical interpretations, there have been the following:

• Louis-Nicolas Clérambault set words based on La Fontaine's fable in the 1730s
• Jacques Offenbach included it in Six Fables de La Fontaine (1842) for soprano and small orchestra
• Benjamin Godard, the last of his Six Fables de La Fontaine (op. 17 1872/9)
• Auguste Moutin (1821-1900) set it as a song in 1876.
• Ernest Reyer set La Fontaine's fable for his own performance
• Jean-René Quignard for 2 children’s voices
• Isabelle Aboulker's setting of La Fontaine's words is on her composite CD Les Fables Enchantées (1979)
• Ida Gotkovsky, the third fable in her Hommage à Jean de La Fontaine for choir and orchestra, commissioned for the tercentenary of La Fontaine's death (1995)
• Claude Ballif, the fourth of his Chansonettes : 5 Fables de La Fontaine for small mixed choir (Op.72, Nº1 1995)
• Debra Kaye set Richard Scrafton Sharpe's lyric version of the fable for mezzo-soprano and piano in 1998. She describes this as 'a mini-opera' that combines the simplicity of folk music and operatic styles.
• Dominique Rebaud choreagraphed the story in Annie Sellem's dance production of Les Fables à La Fontaine in 2004. It is set as a duo which contrasts the routines of contemporary dance and hip-hop.