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The kids are alright
Look, serious theatre! It’s Copenhagen by Michael Frayn, as revived by the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh this month. A night of proper, wordy drama for grown-ups, about science and politics and war and thorny moral dilemmas and complicated issues.
I hated it. In fact, I thought it represented just about everything that’s wrong with Scottish theatre. It was stiffly acted, unimaginatively staged, and offered no compelling reason at all why this script had to be presented on stage, rather than as a film, a TV movie or a radio drama. No wonder hardly any young people were there. Why on earth would they bother? Instead, the audience appeared to be full of middle-aged people and pensioners congratulating themselves on how cultured they were for going to see a night of proper, wordy theatre about science and politics and war and thorny moral dilemmas and complicated issues that people less intelligent than them couldn’t possibly understand.
Well sod that. I’m much more interested in going to see stuff like this…
Yes, it’s a children’s show, Pero, by Speeltheater Holland. It’s coming to Scotland later this month as part of Imaginate, Scotland’s annual children’s theatre festival. Ideally, I’d like to see every show in the festival.
Why? Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll tell you a story. A couple of years back I interviewed Brian Ferguson, an actor best known for starring in the National Theatre of Scotland‘s Black Watch – a proper piece of grown-up theatre about politics and war and complicated issues. Black Watch was already a huge hit in Scotland, where people were calling it the most important piece of Scottish theatre in decades. Sean Connery had gone to see it at the Edinburgh Fringe, and was telling all his celebrity pals about it. Now the show was about to set off on a glamorous world tour, to Los Angeles, New York, then on to Australia, gathering famous fans and masses of media coverage as it went.
And Brian, despite being the best thing in the show, had just decided to walk away from it. His friends thought he’d gone completely bonkers, that he was throwing away a potential career on Broadway or in Hollywood. But Brian didn’t want to go. He was too tactful to say it, but I’ve been told by others that he didn’t even like the show that much.
Instead, Brian wanted to stay in Scotland and experiment. There were two things he seemed particularly excited about. One was pushing the boundaries of what theatre could be - he was particularly drawn to live art, to site-specific theatre, to improvised or devised shows, to theatre where, as he put it, “you’re in the adventure as opposed to watching it”. The other was children’s theatre. At the time he was teaching primary school children, and said he was inspired by their lack of assumptions about what theatre should be - on a stage, with a script and a story, say - and the fact that they were happy just to make up stories as they went along.
The next time I ran into Ferguson was at the Big in Falkirk festival, where I found him combining his two passions by making an ambitious site-specific show with local children. Ferguson had his young cast playing games, hiding in bushes, shooting water pistols, and generally running around, shouting a lot. It was like something from the National Review of Live Art, but with kids. Everyone seemed to be having a ball.
The interesting thing is, there seem to be an awful lot of people like Brian - performers with a passion for boundary-breaking theatre, or live art, who end up making work for children. Take Brian Hartley. After studying illustration at Glasgow School of Art he gravitated towards the live art world, becoming artist-in-residence at the New Moves dance festival (which later became New Territories). Last year he made a show called We Dance, Wee Groove for the Imaginate festival, a kind of toddler disco with “music to move to, for you and your funky young things”. There was live percussion, projection and lights, like a cool club night.
Hartley, though, described it to me like an art installation or a live art performance. “There are many different levels of understanding of the experience,” he said. “I’m trying to work on the structure of the event itself so that it has an element of theatricality.” He was very earnest about his tot disco, full of phrases such as “engaging with the space”, “performative quality” and “breaking the fourth wall”, and saw no contradiction in talking about a show called We Dance, Wee Groove in such an esoteric way.
“The process of getting lost in an imaginary world is something that’s very much desired by the live art world,” he told me. “It’s the same thing, encouraging people to play visually, to learn through making connections or making shapes ... working in the moment. It maybe makes the children and adults think about theatre in a different way. That can be a good thing in terms of opening people’s minds a little bit.”
Elsewhere in that year’s Imaginate programme was Beuysband, a show by the Belgian company Kopergietery for children aged 12 and above, described as “a rock ‘n’ roll kaleidoscope of dance acts, vocal solos, fantastic choreography and beautiful melodies”. That’s Beuys as in Joseph Beuys, the avant-garde German artist regarded as one of the godfathers of performance art. Nele Roels from Kopergietery told me she was “very convinced” there is a natural affinity between live art and children’s theatre: “Beuysband is not conventional because it has not one easy storyline, it’s a lot of short pieces, one after the other. It’s a patchwork of little performances.”
Last week I went for a coffee with Tony Reekie, director of Imaginate for 15 years now. He told me how he first got into theatre in a big way in 1990, Glasgow’s year as European City of Culture. He remembers seeing Robert Lepage and The Wooster Group, and being blown away. Then, he says, 1990 was over and he couldn’t find work like that anywhere in Scotland anymore – until he started going to the Imaginate festival. Suddenly, he was seeing ‘stuff you’d never seen before, that got you genuinely excited about the ways you can tell a story - and in a short time’.
A couple of decades on, and an awful lot of the most exciting, boundary-pushing theatre in Scotland is children’s theatre. The National Theatre of Scotland recognise this, which is why they chose a children’s show, The Wolves in The Walls, as their first main stage production and went on to work with Wee Stories. Grid Iron, who have made a career for themselves making site-specific theatre in airports, department stores and swing parks, recognise this too, which is why they made a show for the Imaginate festival a couple of years ago. David Greig, one of Scotland’s most successful and respected playwrights, knows it as well – hence his decision to write children’s shows like Yellow Moon.
What all these people will tell you is that children understand theatre’s potential better than most grown-ups, because life has not yet imposed limits on their imaginations. Where a lot of adults are uncomfortable with live art – with its disregard for things like plot, or characters with names, its frequent sense of chaos and randomness, its emphasis on sensation and emotional response - children get it completely, because it looks like people playing, just like they do all the time. They don’t worry that they’re not clever enough to ‘get’ something that doesn’t spell out its meaning like a more ‘conventional’ theatre show, or have an obvious beginning, middle or end. They just go with it. “I think children understand theatrical convention from quite a young age, in terms of going to see shows where there are puppets and illusions,” Brian Hartley told me. “I find it very refreshing as an adult, re-engaging with that sense of play that sometimes the pragmatics of being an adult mean you lose.”
There’s an argument, in fact, that the three places you are currently most likely to find exciting, boundary-breaking theatre in Scotland are at Tramway, the Arches and the Imaginate festival. To choose an example, the last couple of theatre shows I got really excited by were Venizke by Victoria theatre company from Belgium, at Tramway, and Once And For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up And Listen, by Ontroerend Goed, also from Belgium, at the Arches.
Who are these companies’ kindred spirits? Where can you check out other cool Belgian companies? At this year’s Imaginate festival, for a start, where the Belgian company Studio Orka will do a children’s show called Lava in the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, in a couple of weeks’ time. Give me that over Copenhagen any day.
Andrew
