Imaginary character becomes real in role-reversal sequel

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This article was published 21/03/2025 (544 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Laura Dowsett’s first professional stage role is an experiment in cross-species genetics: the 24-year-old actor has become a little field mouse.

While scientists at Texan company Colossal Biosciences earlier this month introduced the world to the uber-fluffy, cold-resistant woolly mouse — a rodent-mammoth hybrid — Dowsett didn’t have to undergo any laboratory testing to complete her transformation.

Instead, the U.K.-born actor headed to the studio, the YouTube search bar and her local zoo, where she watched rabbits at rest and in motion to better understand animal instinct.

“Before we touched the script, we set out to find these characters and their physicality,” says Dowsett, who plays one of the more realistic characters in the international touring cast of The Gruffalo’s Child, onstage now at Manitoba Theatre for Young People.

“We watched lots of videos of the woodland creatures, looking at how their mouths move, how they breathe and how they hold themselves in the different quirks that they have.”

From there, the challenge was how to put those motions into a human body.

“So there was lots of animal work first, but then we played around with the question of if these animals were human, what sort of people they would be. Then, we merged the two together so it became an amalgamation. My mouse became a very sassy mouse, very strong, very confident, and very cunning,” she says.

“You may think she is quite timid and small, but she doesn’t let her size get in the way of what she wants. She’s constantly on her toes and ready to go, able to hold her own against all the creatures she meets.”

At her theatre school in Essex, Dowsett specialized in both acting and physical theatre, which she describes as telling stories “in a way that goes beyond using words.”

Incorporating elements of puppetry, circus and mime, among other techniques, Dowsett’s cohort experimented by embodying monkeys, orangutans, meerkats, lions and otters.

Once class ended, the actor often headed to the nature centre in her hometown of Birmingham to get a closer look at the creatures she was understudying.

Now Dowsett gets to put that training to use, portraying the can’t-be-tamed mouse who dreams up the Gruffalo, the title character of author Julia Donaldson’s hit children’s lit series.

For the U.K. company Tall Stories, Gruffalo has been a mainstay since its debut in 2001, when it sold out its run at the Edinburgh Fringe.

But the Gruffalo couldn’t be contained by the borders of the United Kingdom and has since become one of Tall Stories’ leading exports, travelling around the world.

In 2023, the Gruffalo visited the MTYP theatre, and the reception was so warm artistic director Pablo Felices-Luna was compelled to invite the crew back for a sequel.

In The Gruffalo, the mouse tells a cautionary tale of what she thinks is an imaginary creature; in The Gruffalo’s Child, that imaginary creature warns his own daughter about the big bad mouse, highlighting the axiom that as afraid as we are of animals, they are often just as frightened by us.

Dowsett, who owns three cats — Stefan, Garfield and Luna — isn’t scared of mice at all.

“I think they’re so cute. In fact, I’ve had my fair share of encounters trying to save them from my cats.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com