Pippi Goes to the Fair

Abstract

Why don’t we try taking a childlike perspective on theatre? Young readers world-wide have been fascinated by the rascally and wilful girl, Pippi Longstocking, who never conforms to reality as we know it. Whenever she steps out of her own little world at Villekulla Cottage, she turns the familiar upside down. This excerpt is surprising in that Pippi experiences theatrical fiction as reality, while the audience perceives her intervention in events on stage as fiction. We smile because Pippi is so charmingly naive. The drama on stage touches her so much that she feels compelled to intervene. Associations with Bertolt Brecht‘s Aesthetics of Theatre seem appropriate, inviting perhaps a reassessment of the role played by the naïve in Brecht’s concept of theatre.