Opening at the Voila! Theatre Festival next month, Basiltrix: A Family Folk Rock Musical is a rewrite of an Eastern European folk tale from Out of This Crow Productions. It is written with songs by Ida Wrona and directed by Kinga Pazik.
“Basilitrix reimagines the age-old legend through a contemporary, feminist lens. It is a tale about courage, curiosity, and truth, asking what happens when we stop believing stories built on fear and start listening to the voices they silence. Blending rock and jazz with a Slavic folk twist, the musical creates a darkly playful world where humour, danger and tenderness sit side by side.”
Where: Upstairs at the Gatehouse
When: 11-15 Nov
Ticket link: https://www.voilafestival.co.uk/events/basilitrix-a-polish-folk-rock-musical/
Your show Basilitrix: A Family Folk Rock Musical is taking place at Voila this year. What can you tell us about it and about the team behind it?
When teenage Hanna descends into the dungeons beneath Warsaw’s Old Town to rescue her sister, she comes face to face with a petrifying monster. Meanwhile, on the surface, her mother fights a different kind of beast, trying to unite a divided community before paranoia tears the city apart. Two generations, two parallel battles: one below ground, one above. And the whole story is narrated by a team of rather opinionated rats – the Rat Squad. That’s Basilitrix!
Musically, it’s a wild mix of rock, jazz, Slavic folk traditions and… quite a few other genres! Musical theatre lets us play with styles and find unexpected connections: one moment it’s a moving ballad, the next a rock anthem. You’ll also hear dissonant harmonies inspired by Polish folk and contemporary choral music. Ania Drewniok, who orchestrated the score, did a fabulous job bringing it all together, and our musical director, Laoise Fleming, is working with the actors and the band to bring the score to life.
Basilitrix is the kind of story I would have loved to see growing up. It’s about brave women, their bonds, courage and resilience. I’ve always loved legends, but I didn’t like that almost all of them had only male protagonists. I believe folk stories are wonderfully malleable. We can reshape them to make them relevant today. In my case, that meant turning one into a piece where girls can finally see themselves as the heroes, and where empathy means strength.
Folklore is also a beautiful way to connect with people and create a community. We talk about it a lot in our team, sharing stories from our own cultures and discovering how much we have in common. Our team is Polish, Romanian, English, Irish, Maltese, Australian and Canadian. We keep finding similarities in our ancestry and traditions. We love discovering these connections; they bring us closer together!
We’ve also decided to keep everyone’s natural accents on stage. Everyone deserves to see and hear themselves represented in theatre, and there’s no reason why we should all sound the same. Families and communities come in all sounds, and modern folk stories should reflect that.
For some of us, Basilitrix has also become a way to reconnect with our heritage. Joanna, who plays Hanna’s mother, Albina, has Czech roots, and Prague has its own Basilisk legend! Kristie, who plays Ratmother, is Australian, but her beloved grandmother grew up in Warsaw, so she must have heard the legend as a child. And our illustrator, Katya, who has Polish-Austrian roots, draws inspiration from traditional folk paper cut-outs, woodcuts and linocuts.
If you come to the show, you’ll be able to take some of her art home! We’ll have colouring books, stickers, hand-carved linocut bookmarks and prints handprinted on handmade paper. And rat ears! You can’t forget about the rat ears because anyone can join the Rat Squad!
I’d love to share everyone’s stories here, but there are nearly 20 of us, so I think that might be a bit much for your readers, Louise, haha! You can find them all in our programme.
Your venue is Upstairs at the Gatehouse. What appeals about that space and how has it informed the development of the show for this festival?
As soon as I saw that Upstairs at the Gatehouse was one of the venue options, I knew I wanted Basilitrix to be performed there. It has a great reputation for championing new, original musicals, and the team is incredibly supportive.
Our show is quite big for a fringe production, so we also needed a place with enough space to fit us all. Eight actors and the four-piece live band sitting centre stage, to be exact. I always wanted the band to be an integral part of the Rat Squad and interact with the actors rather than be hidden away. It makes the whole experience more playful and invites the audience in.
Basilitrix also features shadow puppetry. We drew inspiration from traditional Polish paper cut-outs (wycinanki) and the rich puppetry traditions of Białystok, where our director Kinga Pazik, costume designer Ewelina Głowacka and set designer Piotr Galar come from. The thrust stage at Upstairs at the Gatehouse allows to move screens around and play with where the shadow figures appear. It gives us an opportunity to surprise the audience and bring a bit of mystery into the storytelling.
Can you sell the show to a potential audience in one sentence?
Basilitrix is a darkly playful family folk rock musical about brave women, a sassy monster, and three very opinionated rats.
Was it a key consideration to reimagine this story from a feminist perspective, and was it easy to do so?
Yes! Turning the Basilisk into a woman felt very natural to me.
From the very first verses I wrote, I knew my Basilisk was going to be this flamboyant, sassy queen, a kind of Polish sister to Oogie Boogie from The Nightmare Before Christmas! Traditionally, the Polish Basilisk is half-rooster, half-snake, a bit like the English cockatrice, so for our first performance I turned myself into a hen-snake queen in green tulle and red feathers. Our current costume is an upgrade: I found it at an Opera North sale in 2024, and our costume designer Ewelina spiced it up a bit!
As for the female perspective, my favourite version of the Warsaw Basilisk legend has always been the one where a clever girl realises she can defeat the monster with a mirror and save her brother. But I started wondering what would happen if they were sisters instead. What would make one of them go down into the dungeons in the first place? What would their mother do when she realised her girls were missing? And what would the town look like if all the men were petrified in the dungeons and only women were left above ground?
As I kept asking myself these questions, new layers of the story started unfolding: new characters, new conflicts and a depth to the myth I never expected when I wrote the first song – the villain song.
We need more stories about strong, smart women, sisterhood and caring for one another. What I love about Basilitrix is that its women are brave in very different ways. Hanna goes down into the dungeons to face an actual monster, while her mother faces something that might be even harder to defeat: a whole community caught up in fear and rumours. Both are fighting for the people they love.
And what’s next for the show?
We’d love to take Basilitrix on a UK tour, especially to places with Central and Eastern European communities. It’s a fun way to discover Polish culture, and we want to share it both with people who grew up with these legends and with those who have never heard of them.
Above all, we dream of Basilitrix becoming a platform for intercultural connection, just as it already has within our own team. That’s why, on tour, we’re hoping to run shadow puppetry workshops alongside the show, where audiences can try the technique themselves and discover something about Polish folk traditions. We’ve already run one at the Lewisham Polish Centre in September, and it was so much fun!
Basilitrix still has room to grow, too! The current 90-minute version is a complete show, and we’re really proud of it, but I can imagine it becoming a full two-act musical. Two characters in particular deserve a little more space to tell their stories, and I’d love to explore that with a theatre or an independent producer. So if there’s a theatre out there interested in helping a Polish monstress spread her wings, we’d love to talk!
And one more dream: to keep growing our Rat Squad until everyone has their own rat name! Our team already includes Ratina Menzel, Rat Damon, ShakiRat, Meryl Squeak, Ratniss Everdeen and Rata Gerwig. Grab your rat ears (or pick up a pair at one of our shows) and come join us!
What’s your rat alter ego, Louise? [still thinking about this one!] And what about your readers? Anyone who sends us their rat name on Instagram (@basilitrix_musical) will get a personalised Certifi-Rat to collect for free at the show!
Basilitrix – A Family Folk Rock Musical is supported by Polish Cultural Institute in London and Lewisham Polish Centre.