The Modern Little Mermaid Is One That Breaks Down The Myth Of Perfect Love

Somewhat fortuitously, I find a collection of Hans Christian Andersen fables in Elizabeth's Books the day of my interview with Meow Meow (born Melissa Madden Gray) and, flicking through the contents wonder how her Little trilogy — which began with the smash hit Little Match Girl, premiering in 2011, and the second installment of which, Little Mermaid, will premiere in January at the Sydney Festival — may end. Little Tuck? Little Ida? Little Christina? A Little Green Ones with an overabundance of collaborations?

But we're getting too far ahead of ourselves, Meow Meow is still developing the show, and will make yet another trip to the US before the year is out.

"I'm just back from Boston where I was doing a show called An Audience With Meow Meow — terribly thrilling because it's got Broadway money in it and bits and pieces — then I did Brecht/Weill Die Sieben Todsunden with the orchestra here in Melbourne, and the minute I finish rehearsals I'm back to San Francisco, so you're lucky to catch me!"

"But fairytales, they keep coming back to me, they slap me in the face like a cold fish, really."

In San Francisco, partnered with the city's symphony, she will perform In Descent, thematically concerned with the concept of sinking, drowning, and deteriorating.

"There's a sort of water theme that's running through everything. There's an aquatic through line of sorts. But fairytales, they keep coming back to me, they slap me in the face like a cold fish, really."

Andersen's tale — or at least the Disney rendering of it — is well known, but Meow Meow has been constructing her own reading of the fable, where the splitting of the mermaid's tale and the cutting of her tongue reflect a female castration that permeates the myth of perfect love.

"I like to use the Little Mermaid as a springboard, to continue the diving metaphor, into the whole history of sirens and sea maidens being either good or bad forces, whose beautiful song was either to protect ships from wild winds and rocks, or [lure] men to their death.

"I think it's a very real dilemma as a traveling showgirl — can you have love and can you have a career? Not that it's that simple, but there's resonances of course. Do you have to lose yourself entirely to make yourself presentable for modern love, or is that all a myth? And if you do that and you lose your agency do you lose the thing that actually made you interesting? What is abandoned and what is set free? What is liberating and what is constricting? What's bondage by choice? And of course, modern love, and how we are saturated by it, but what's real, and does it matter?"

Joining Meow Meow on the diving board are people like Kate Miller-Heidke, Amanda Palmer and Megan Washington, all of whom have contributed songs to the production.

"They're all women who know me well and are very different songwriters, but that makes it interesting as well because you've got your friends writing songs for you with their various takes on where we're going with the mermaid, the siren, the dilemmas of being a female performer and all the power and the fret that's within the voice. We're all women of the sea; we're all travellers."