The ice cream of the stage

Published on Sunday 2 May 2004 01:00

THE fantastic thing about children’s theatre, says Gill Robertson, is the freedom it brings. "If you want to work with a furniture-maker and a shoe-maker producing a set made out of ice cream, you can do it," she says.

Robertson might not be a household name, but at 35 she is one of the most internationally successful theatre practitioners in Scotland. Among the seven plays that her company, Catherine Wheels, has staged since 1999 are Martha, one of the few Scottish productions ever to play on Broadway, and Lifeboat, which won the 2002 Barclays Stage Award for Best UK Show for Children and Young People.

Once her new show, Cyrano, is up and running, the Edinburgh-based director will be setting Lifeboat back afloat for a tour of Ireland plus five Canadian festivals. That’s as well as revivals of Martha and The Story of the Little Gentleman, not forgetting a Christmas show at the Macrobert in Stirling, all before the year is through.

In terms of recognition, children’s companies have been the Cinderellas of theatre. But things are changing. Over the past decade, the standard of children’s theatre produced in Scotland has steadily improved, encouraged in part by exposure to high-quality work at the annual Children’s International Theatre Festival in May. No one is ever going to get famous working in children’s theatre, but it is no longer perceived as quite such a poor relation: playwrights including Nicola McCartney, Isabel Wright, David Greig, David Harrower and Liz Lochhead have all happily written for younger audiences in recent years.

More tangibly, the Scottish Arts Council has made an overt shift towards supporting the sector. Last November it announced it was giving new grants worth upwards of 91,000 each to Catherine Wheels, Visible Fictions and Giant Productions. The SAC’s message was clear: by no longer guaranteeing core funding to 7:84, Suspect Culture, Borderline and others, it was making it possible to fulfil the Scottish Executive’s desire to see more young people experiencing the arts.

Considerably less clear, however, was why the SAC put under threat the funding for TAG, another company dedicated to work for young people. Like many in the industry, Robertson is bewildered about TAG’s proposed 50% cut, but she is adamant that her own success in the funding battle is not simply because Catherine Wheels happens to fit in with the Scottish Executive’s political aims.

"I don’t agree with TAG being cut at all," she says. "But one of the benefits of anyone being cut is that this money was released to fund Visible Fictions and Catherine Wheels, which needed to happen. If it hadn’t happened I was seriously thinking of teaching or hairdressing because I couldn’t have carried on. If you look at the past 10 years in Scotland, children’s theatre has been the one area that has developed the most. It’s good work, it’s winning awards, it’s going abroad and it did need to be funded."

The latest proof of that will come this Thursday when her production of Cyrano opens in Musselburgh before a 17-stop tour, including a run in the Children’s International Theatre Festival in Edinburgh. Pitched at the over-10s, it’s a stripped-down version of Edmond Rostand’s bitter-sweet tale of Cyrano de Bergerac, the brilliant poet cursed with an outsize nose who helps his friend Christian woo the gorgeous Roxanne only to fall in love with her himself.

The original has more than 30 characters plus assorted lackeys, pastry cooks and cadets to help create a vision of life in 17th-century Paris. By contrast, the version by Jo Roets being used by Catherine Wheels requires just three actors. Is Robertson selling her young audiences short?

"Is it Cyrano-lite?" she says. "No, you wouldn’t expect kids to go in and watch the National Theatre production of it. It’s quite difficult language. This version still has the verse and poetry, but it’s like taking the top 10 scenes. What it does is concentrate on the themes that young people are interested in: it’s about Cyrano and how he feels about having this nose and the love affair. The original play is set just before the French Revolution when there were all these ideals about independence. It’s about him being a strident independent thinker. I don’t think that is of a lot of interest to young people, but the three-way love triangle is."

She adds: "A lot of theatre that kids get taken to see is classic texts - the Shakespeares at one of your reps - and more than likely they’ll be bored rigid by it. This is a classic text that’s 70-minutes long, with three actors. It’s very visual, very theatrical and they’ll be entertained, informed and engaged by it."

There’s a difference, however, between pitching a show to appeal to the interests of children and reducing it in a way that talks down to them.

"You’ve got to have worlds, emotions and experiences that are common to them, because that’s the way they’re learning at that age," she says. "But there’s a thousand different ways to tell those stories. With two puppets, with actors, just using your feet, in shadows, with animals: there are lots of theatrical approaches. For under-sixes, for example, you wouldn’t do a show about the Second World War specifically, but you could do a show about war or prejudice. So in some ways it’s simplifying, but theatrically it can be adventurous."

The exciting by-product of this way of working is that it produces a style of theatre that is frequently more engaging, imaginative and transformative than adult theatre with all its stuffy naturalistic conventions. Because of this, grown-ups often find themselves getting a bigger kick out of children’s theatre than work aimed at them. "I’m not interested in soap opera and talking heads on stage. A lot of adult theatre is like that," says Robertson.

"In Cyrano, you need to make it come alive visually. You need to have symbols of love. For Cyrano to say his poetry to Roxanne isn’t enough, so Roxanne is maybe wrapping flowers around herself or lights are coming on or white doves are being released, stuff like that."

Robertson’s next ambition is to raise Lottery money to fund the company’s expansion into schools. "A lot of work that goes into schools is old-fashioned and traditional. People are used to theatre-in-education, so if you put on work which is more about telling a drama than dealing with issues there can be problems. I don’t want to do morality plays, I want to do good drama."

The company’s core funding from the SAC means she’ll have time to think about pushing the boundaries in all the company’s work. "That’s why the field is really exciting and why it’s got room to grow: we can be a lot braver and we can take a lot more risks."

Cyrano opens at the Brunton Theatre, Musselburgh, on Thursday and tours until June 19