Tink – The Other Palace

Tink continues at The Other Palace Studio until 20 October 2024.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

In the world of Lizzy Connolly and Kat Kleve’s Tink, fairies start out human-sized and only shrink as they get older. When five-year-old fairy Tink (played by Kleve) hears about her namesake, Tinker Bell, in a bedtime story reading of Peter Pan, she is incensed. Why aren’t Tinker Bell and Wendy best friends? And what can she do to stay the size she is now? Unfortunately, the patriarchy has other ideas, and as she grows up she finds new ways in which others want to belittle her and cause her to shrink.

Thus is the stage set for a charming one-woman show, with Kleve playing and singing her own songs on a theme of female empowerment. Starting with the aspirational ‘Fairy Story’, in which Tink dreams of the adult fairy she wants to be, Kleve is a warm and engaging figure.

We speed through the years as Tink and her childhood best friend Chloe start to go on different paths. In the character’s world, gender segregation is replaced by different species, with elves and fairies acting as metaphorical substitutes for boys and girls in our world. But the same attitudes play in. There is outright misogyny, with elves looking down on fairies as inferior – but some of the same attitudes are reinforced by Tink’s mother, however unintentionally.

And as Tink grows from toddler to tween and teenager, the pressure to stay in her lane, to put herself down so that her classmates can shine, is highly relatable. While Tink is gradually discovering that she has talents of her own, she’s consistently belittled for not being pretty enough, or daring to like a handsome elf that other fairies are also interested in.

Kleve’s songs echo the sense of angst that will be familiar memories to anyone who’s ever experienced such struggles growing up. The musical style of each also progresses as Tink matures, with influences developing from Disney and Avril Lavigne to Joni Mitchell via Taylor Swift.

Meanwhile, Connolly’s book offers a great deal of food for thought on how much pressure we apply to girls and young women, and how in consequence they apply so much to themselves and their friends. Tink’s story may be set in fairyland, but the travails are very real.

The song lyrics expand upon Tink’s feelings, rather than driving them or eliciting a wider self-awareness, and that can contribute to a feeling that the full hour of Tink is a little light of content.

But its message that girls, like fairies, don’t have to shrink away as they grow up is sweetly delivered, with moments of real emotional power. It is a tale that many of the fairies – and, indeed, the elves – among us deserve to take to their hearts.

Scott Matthewman