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Sat 12 Dec 2008Why it's time to bring a major Irish artist home
CULTURE SHOCK:Have we sufficiently recovered from the cultural ideology of the 1930s to recognise a great storyteller's magic imagination?, asks Fintan O'Toole
IN THIS pantomime season, no story will be more roundly abused than that of Cinderella. It has become so hackneyed that it is a shock to encounter it as it might have been told by a genuine artist of the European oral tradition. I came across an astonishingly moving and beautiful version recently. It has all the usual elements: the exploited child of a dead mother, the wicked stepsisters, the handsome prince, the glass slipper. But it is at once more real and more magical.
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