Red Riding Hood is a rebel fighter, Cinderella falls in love with the queen and Rumpelstiltskin is reimagined as an adoring father who willingly reveals his name to the baby he loves. These are the new empowered heroines and gentle, alternative heroes starring in this year’s Christmas theatre productions, as scriptwriters and directors across the country seek to make the classic fairytales parents hold dear more relevant to children today.

The shows opening in the next few weeks include a cross-dressing cabaret version of The Ugly Duckling, called Duckie, at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff, Rumpelstiltskin retold as a glamorous modern family drama at the Southbank Centre in London and a rebellious reinvention of Hansel & Gretel.

In this telling of the tale, at the Rose theatre in Kingston, London, Gretel joins forces with Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and Cinderella against a powerful sorceress.

Philip Pullman’s Grimm Tales, which combines six fairytales from Pullman’s collection, is another new adaptation showing this Christmas at London’s Unicorn theatre. Kirsty Housley, the director, believes that, contrary to popular opinion, fairytales can actually be empowering stories for both girls and boys. “Again and again you’ve got young women – and young men – who cope on their own in difficult situations and learn to handle things by themselves, without their parents,” she says.

Le Gateau Chocolat’s Duckie interprets the Ugly Duckling as a victim of bullying. Photograph: Manuel Vason

She tries to bring this aspect to the fore in her show. “I wanted to respect the tales but dig down into what is useful about them. I think there’s something really beautiful about the morals but I do feel like some of those morals have been misinterpreted over time, particularly by the Victorians. They’ve somehow got channelled through this lens of ‘the beautiful princess’ – that’s not what these stories are about.”

In her production, the Cinderella character of the original Brothers Grimm story, A Thousand Furs, is a clever, gutsy young woman who falls in love with a queen. The production is aimed at families with children aged eight and over.

“There will be people in the audience who don’t want to watch another heteronormative love story that ends with a prince and princess getting married. We get told that story so often, it can feel a bit oppressive. I’ve got two young daughters, and the tide of princesses is very hard to hold back from your door.”

Rumpelstiltskin at the Southbank Centre in London is a doting father. Photograph: Shane Reid

Last month, Keira Knightley said she felt the princesses in Disney’s Cinderella and The Little Mermaid are such bad role models that she has banned her daughter from watching the films. Housley says she is very aware of the anti-feminist messages fairytales traditionally impart to young girls. “I didn’t want to tell stories to a group of eight-year-old girls that just reinforced to them that beauty equals goodness. That’s not OK any more.”

In a “very camp” Rumpelstiltskin, set within the world of the fashion industry, the writer Rosemary Myers also encourages her audience to question why it’s so important to be beautiful by revealing a backstory to the traditional tale: after Rumpelstiltskin was born ugly, his parents locked him away. “He always craved the love of human beings.” Naturally, he then cannot help loving the baby he takes from its mother, leading to a custody battle (and a car chase).

Myers deliberately put an “audacious modern spin” on a well-known story. “I think fairytales have survived over time because they do have this deep psychological resonance for children – and because families know the stories, they’re accessible for theatre audiences. But then it is about where the artist’s imagination takes the story, in terms of making it contemporary.”

Children learn to handle crises by themselves in Philip Pullman’s Grimm Tales. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

It was important to her to include a heroine her nieces would admire – one who has far more agency than the passive princess of the original tale. “It didn’t come out of a political imperative. More: how do we make our story feel resonant, dynamic and relevant to a modern audience?”

Duckie, written and performed by the one-man musical phenomenon Le Gateau Chocolat, is appearing in Cardiff and at the Roundhouse in London this Christmas. It reimagines the Ugly Duckling as a talented operatic singer and cabaret dancer working at an animal circus, who falls victim to homophobic bullying and racist abuse. At the end, he manages to find happiness and acceptance with his mother but is never physically transformed into a swan.

“The idea is that, metaphorically, you accept that the swan is within you,” Gateau explains. “The moral of the traditional Ugly Duckling fairytale is that if you go through hardships, somehow you become a swan. The reality is, you are sometimes just a duck that’s born different. The message to kids – and parents – is: that should be enough.”

Hansel and Gretel must fight a powerful sorceress.

In Kingston, Ciaran McConville hopes boys will leave his Star Wars-inspired version of Hansel & Gretel saying that their favourite character in the show is female. His production, which stars a funny hodge-podge mix of characters from different fairytales, challenges a wide range of gender stereotypes and heterosexual assumptions. For example, his Frog Prince would happily kiss a prince, not just a princess. “Young people today are so much more thoughtful and sensitive about notions of gender, and they’re more interested in it.”

He knew putting on a contemporary version of a fairytale at Christmas would prove less of a risk for the theatre, financially, than if he wrote a completely new story. “Commercially, Hansel & Gretel makes sense. Everyone knows the story, everyone knows the kids are going to go on an adventure. But at the same time it offers us the character of Gretel, known for her quick thinking and problem solving – which is a really great place to start.”

He hopes his production touches on themes that speak to a young audience without being patronising or preachy. “It’s not trying to be this great feminist piece. It’s a Christmas show about love and courage and self-realisation.”