There’s a Grimm truth that lurks,usually unheeded, in the shadows of intense yearning. "Be careful what you wish for..." it warns. But surely, for a child, wishing for is all about hope, not fear?

That’s how it looks "once upon a time". at the beginning of Snow White, but family audiences will see how a Queen’s wish moves towards an unhappy ending for her daughter when Newcastle’s balletLORENT brings their dance-theatre version of the fairy tale to Edinburgh next week.

Choreographer Liv Lorent, herself now a mother of two, has been exploring the dark sides of mother-love with this new Snow White, the second instalment of a trilogy that started with Rapunzel and will probably end with Rumpelstiltskin.

“I really didn’t think we would go for Snow White, ever,” says Lorent. “I have absolutely no interest in the cliches of evil stepmothers. Then I found out that, originally, it was Snow White’s real mother who wanted her dead – the Grimm story altered it, because it seemed too appalling! And then it became wonderfully complicated and terrifying, and much more interesting.”

Lorent rallied the creative team who had worked with her on Rapunzel – including Doctor Who composer Murray Gold and Game of Thrones designer Libby Everall – and, with writer Carol Ann Duffy returning as her partner in story-telling, she plunged into devising a new Snow White. Stepping away from Disney and body-swerving pantomime, she delivers a fairy-tale that has thought-provoking grit as well as mystery, tension and meaning for our own times. If Lorent was intrigued by the choreographic possibilities – even more so because of her passion for making high quality, family-friendly work – Duffy is on record as a champion of fairy-tales, enthusing that they “have everything: fear, cruelty, bawdiness, good and bad parenting, magic, domestic violence and huge anxiety. They take you to the edge of terror and pull you back at the last minute. I so relished that as a child.”

Having established that Snow White’s mother was the villain of the piece, Lorent and Duffy set about weaving a context and a motivation for the Queen’s change of heart – why had she wished so hard for a child in the first place? Lorent ties it into that very human foible of a reasonable wish for the wrong reasons.

“Here’s a woman, a Queen, who is surrounded by luxury, is adored and indulged. She’s looking at her own reflection – she’s beautiful. Snow is falling – it’s beautiful. What could make it even more perfect? Of course – a beautiful baby, with the right kind of colouring.” And Lorent quotes the Grimm lines that the Queen asks the Fates to make a flesh-and-blood reality: “Skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony.” A royal mini-me: perfect.

For Lorent, what surfaced with a compelling intensity in Duffy’s astute scenario, was how much of a metaphorical mirror the story was for our own times.

“We place so much importance on appearance,” she says. “On looking good – on looking young. And Snow White’s mother is obsessed with both. At first, she’s happy that her daughter is so pretty and treats her almost like a little doll. That’s a trap I think our own society has been falling into, marketing perfumes for babies and children, designer fashions, staging beauty pageants. Our children aren’t our accessories, you really do have to be aware of what it is you’re buying into and ask yourself, 'is this really right for them?' When I’m putting on my make-up in the morning, my little girl – she’s two – watches everything I do. She’s already curious. Sooner rather than later, she’ll be wanting to try it, and it’s a difficult tight-rope, knowing how and when to help her grow up. Snow White’s mother really is an awful warning, ladies! As your daughter becomes a young woman, you are ageing, and beginning to lose the beauty you now see in her.”

Lorent is laughing as she says this, but in her choreography this is a crucial tilting point in the mother-daughter relationship. A handsome King that the widowed Queen has designs on, mistakes the young girl for his intended fiancee – after all she looks like the portrait that had been sent to him.

“It’s a brilliant twist that Carol Ann came up with,” continues Lorent. “It’s so like what people do on Facebook or Tinder, posting old photos or really flattering selfies that are as much a self-deluding image as they are a deception to others. I think we do understand this woman, who’s probably only late thirties or early forties, and could maybe even feel sorry for her, until she sends for the huntsman and orders him to kill Snow White.”

In another crafty plot move, the huntsman is also the head of the mine-workers who toil, underneath the Palace, keeping the Queen in luxury while they labour and live in dirt, cold and misery.

“Our miners are nothing like the Disney animation,” says Lorent with evident relish. “Adults in the audience will probably pick up on the social comment that’s woven into the work, the class divide that’s further polarised because its only among the workers that Snow White finds kindness, but also the kind of honesty that cuts through the pampered, privileged lifestyle she’s taken for granted.”

On-stage, Lorent’s company of eleven dancers – augmented with several locally recruited youngsters – brings the action alive as it shifts from bedroom to forest to cottage.

“It is challenging, for all of us,” says Lorent. “The dancers have to be trees, animals, villagers, miners – and work with a different group of children everywhere we tour. Their bodies are setting the mood and location as much as the scenery. The obvious thing to do would have been to use projections, but they’re expensive and I feel that they introduce ‘screen’ values into a live theatre piece, so we’ve gone for lo-tech magic instead. Film does make it easier is in getting across the idea of ‘beauty’, when you can just have these long, lingering closeups from perfect angles. But we’ve got really talented, characterful dancers who make sure everyone knows what the story is. For adults, there are issues about what having a child means. Women, especially, have come up to us to say ‘I know what that whole mother-daughter jealousy feels like.’ But children really get totally involved too. Sometimes they are scared, but children totally understand fairness, and they know the Queen keeps behaving in a selfish, unfair way. If you’re going to ask the mirror to tell you the truth, you have to come to terms with what it reflects.”

balletLORENT presents Snow White at Festival Theatre in Edinburgh on Friday January 22 and Saturday January 23 and at Pitlochry Festival Theatre on Friday February 26 and Saturday February 27.