It's Good To Be Bad

Overview

Treading The Borders Present ‘It’s Good To Be Bad’

The boss of the baddies, the Wicked Queen, has had enough. She’s had enough of being vanquished, defeated and dethroned. The Wicked Queen has layers. She is the true star of the fairy tale. SHE should be centre stage. Everyone loves a baddie, don’t they? 

Well not everyone apparently. Snow White doesn’t, Rapunzel doesn’t, Hansel and Gretel doesn’t. This time at the end of the story the good guys are all coming for much more than just the ‘happily ever after’. They’re coming for it all! 

What is the Wicked Queen to do? Is it time to vanquish the good, for good? And who really are the good guys in this story? 

In a call to arms to all her fellow hard done baddies of literature, the Wicked Queen aims to re-claim the narrative. The inaugural meeting of the ‘It’s Good to be Bad’ society awaits the arrival of the Wicked Queen’s own army of bad, including Captain Hook, The Big Bad Wolf, Rumpelstiltskin. 

‘It’s Good To Be Bad’ flips the fairy tale format on its head and poses the question to those who dare to look truly into the mirror; ‘Mirror mirror on the wall, who am I after all?” 

—–

Written by Tom Murray

Performed by Jane Houston Green

Illustration by Rachel Houston

Tom Murray

Tom is a playwright, poet, and fiction writer based in Dumfries stories and poems are published in Scotland and further afield. His plays are widely performed including DunsPlayFest. He was a Scottish Poetry Library Poetry Ambassador 2021-23. Presently a mentor on the Scottish Poetry Writers Centre. Publications: The Future Is Behind You (Poetry), Sin of the Father (Play), The Clash (Play), Out Of My Head (Fiction), There is a Place I Go (Poetry), The Permanent Room (Fiction).

Jane Houston Green

In 2000, when living in Zimbabwe, Jane was cast as the Evil Queen in Snow White playing a four-week run in a 500-seat theatre. It was packed every night and the audience booed, hissed and shouted loudly .. very loudly because they could and it was safe to do so. The show provided a release from the tensions and fear of living through the brutal farm invasions, political intimidation and economic freefall. There is little doubt that the world would benefit from the baddies in life being relegated to, and confined by, the pages of novels, stories and theatre scripts.