A poignant, sensitive look at the insidious dangers of xenophobia, the horrors of war and the challenges of immigration.

This is a very clever show which uses spoken word, shadow puppetry and contemporary photographs to tell the story of an Italian couple whose lives are indelibly impacted by the events of the mid 20th century. The presenters are Clare Testoni and Paul Grabovac who speak and manipulate the lights around the mini statues and figures.

It is essentially the story of Clare’s great grandmother and great grandfather, Antoinetta and Sante, caught up in the fight against the rise of fascism, with Sante staying in Italy to fight and Antoinetta and their two young sons fleeing to Australia.

There is a strong tradition of Italian fairy tales with Basile’s ‘Pentamerone’ pre-dating the Brothers Grimm and featuring many characters known today such as Puss in Boots and Sleeping Beauty.

The team from Bow & Dagger have drawn on this tradition so that the contemporary narrative is framed in vignettes featuring ogres and princes and kings and castles.

The individual elements presented include Anoinetta and Sante meeting and falling in love, Sante fighting with the Italian resistance and Antoinetta and the boys being interned in Queensland just for being Italian.

As Clare tells us, she had to work very hard to extricate any details of these stories from her family members.  Little has ever been told, mainly it seems, because those involved saw their experiences as a price to pay and wanted to move on and look forward to the new life beyond rather than dwell on the unhappy past.

Fortunately, Tale of Tales is able to bring such suppressed stories to light and to life, and as Paul tells us, this is important because prejudice and xenophobia are recurring themes in history.

I very much enjoyed being taken to that unfamiliar world and reminded of the types of challenges Antoinetta and Sante had to endure.  Tale of Tales is a very classy, understated production which is well worth a look.