Nothing to Fear

"If you keep bogies and goblins away from children they will make them up for themselves. One small child in the dark can invent more hells than Swedenborg," wrote G.K. Chesterton in an essay on fairy tales. That was the late nineteenth century and in the twenty-first we seem not to worry about fairy tales frightening children any more.

In children's theatre, especially panto, wicked witches and evil stepmothers are fine. They can be booted headfirst into the oven or have their eyes pecked out by doves. Yet the bogies and goblins of real life—like Death, Relationship Breakdown, Fear and Anxiety—are rarer visitors to this world.

In Edinburgh this year, three plays for younger children take precisely these real-world anxieties and place them centre stage.

"Is death really an appropriate subject for a children's play?" I ask Peter Wilson, the creator and star of a moving puppet adaptation of Wolf Ehrlbruch's children's story, Duck, Death and the Tulip. "I don't see why not," Wilson replies. "Children have pets, they die – we just don't really talk about it." He is a firm believer that theatre is the right place to start start such important conversations: "Plays should allow children to experience life as they experience it outside."

When Wilson was only five years old, his own brother died. Nobody told him it was going to happen, and afterwards nobody would talk about it. "I just wish I could have read Ehrlbruch's book then," he says. Perhaps this goes someway to explaining his commitment to a production which has death at its heart.

One of the most distinctive aspects of Duck, Death and the Tulip is the way in which Death is not made into a bogey to be cheerfully vanquished but is, rather, a kindly old gentleman. Death is part of life, not its final tragedy.

In this decidedly un-panto approach, it resembles Tiger Tale, a theatrical dance work choreographed by Natasha Gilmore. The adult issue it tackles is not death but family breakdown. As her parents argue, a girl feels evermore ignored. In one particularly disturbing sequence, she imagines being a tiger and brutally ravishing her mother. Then an "actual" tiger appears. The dangerous, prowling beast causes chaos, but also jolts the family out of a destructive cycle of soul-eroding routine. They learn to play, and everyone lives happily ever after. (But who, one might legitimately ask, does the washing-up?)

"In effect," explains Gilmore "the daughter conjures up the tiger unwittingly because she needs something in her life she's not getting. Tiger is risk, Tiger is wildness." It's a sophisticated concept for a child or an adult. Something bad, violent, angry can be attractive, vital even. Like William Blake's Tyger, stalking the "forests of the night", our own "tigers" may be wild and dangerous, but they also contain the vivid, revolutionary energy which makes us human.

Tall Stories' Emily Brown and the Thing tackles not so much an object of fear, but fear itself. The play is adapted from the best-selling book by Cressida Cowell and tells the story of the young Emily as she tries to get to sleep. Every time she tries to close her eyes she is disturbed by a noise. Upon investigation, she finds the noise is caused by a moaning Thing. He's moaning because he wants his comforter, then his warm milk, then his special cough medicine.

Emily goes on an adventure with her pet rabbit, Sidney, to fetch the missing items. But the Thing keeps on moaning, until eventually Emily discovers that he is scared. "Why didn't you say so?" exclaims the fearless adventuress, before explaining that to conquer anxiety it helps to think of nice thoughts.

As Anna Wheatley, who plays Emily, explains, "It's pretty clear as an adult that all the fears are Emily's own, projected on to the Thing. She is scared of going to sleep, and the cuddly, the milk and the cough medicine, they're all distraction techniques." She believes fear of going sleep is an almost universal childhood experience and recalls that she herself went "absolutely crazy before bed as a child, and I did exactly the same things as Emily, because I was afraid of being alone in my room with the light off."

She even remembers her mum giving her the same advice—to think nice thoughts—as Emily gives the Thing. It's one aspect that Wheatley loves about the book and the play – it allows Emily to take the parental role. It displays Emily's fear, without diminishing her. It allows Emily to inhabit the heroine role completely: "Rather than have Emily Brown scared of the noise, she goes on an adventure."

Social realism and real-world issues are not new to the family stage – Coram Boy and War Horse have been two of the biggest hits of the decade. Even Jacqueline Wilson's Tracey Beaker, the last word in gritty real life, has been made into a stage play. But these are aimed at older children and have no element of magic. For younger children it is often the magical and the fantastical that enables them to appreciate and accept the reality.

As Bruno Bettelheim argues in his seminal defence of the fairy tale, although magical devices may be "unreal", they are not "untrue". In fact what these three plays resemble most is a fairy tale in which the metaphorical coating has worn thin. There is still magic and wonder, but their unreality is made synonymous with truth.

The last thing to note, of course, is that children are pretty resilient; we can probably worry too much about upsetting them. As I exit Duck, Death and the Tulip, I overhear a mother and her daughter discussing the play. "That was so sad," says the mum, slightly teary. "The duck was funny," says the daughter, oblivious.