In her present-day adaptation (1986) of the worldfamous Andersen fairy tale, the Dutch writer Judith Herzberg pares the tale down to its bare essentials and tells it in ample yet clear metaphors and a poetic language that is both highly musical and goes to the core.

The themes developed in Herzberg’s text are richly layered. It is about adulthood, wonder, (self-)delusion, hankering, but also about not belonging, disunity, transience and most of all the willingness to sacrifice oneself. How can we possibly love somebody so much that the most horrendous pains, not even death can dull our love? To what extent do we hand in our passports, do we put our own identity on the line, who and what we are, to fit the image others have of us or that we try to worm ourselves into?

Apart from a fairy tale about love, the collapse of all modes of expression and the seeming incompatibility of two different worlds, The Little Mermaid is also a metaphor for the desire shared by music theatre ensemble WALPURGIS and theatre ensemble De Roovers to melt the worlds of music and the spoken word into one.