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A Schools' Tour in GermanyDateline: 3rd June, 2001 Playing in a school is always a bit worrying. Will the audience watch and listen? Will they want to? Will they show any interest? Are you just there so the staff can have a bit of a break? You always approach schools' performances with a bit of trepidation, no matter how often you've done them. Kids are just so unpredictable in this situation. And it's a lot worse when you're abroad, performing in what, to the audience, is a foreign language. Musicals are generally OK, particularly well-known ones, but when it's a very serious (albeit with touches of humour) straight play with no "action" and just two actresses onstage, boy, do you worry! So we felt as the first of our performances in Wuppertal approached. Admittedly we were playing to the German equivalent of sixth-formers who had chosen English as one of their main subjects, but we still worried. No one said anything though: we were just uncharacteristically quiet! 
The opening of "Adult Child Dead Child" in the Gymnasium Vohwinkel No lighting. No sound. No stage even. Just a few semi-circular rows of chairs for the audience, and a set consisting of one chair. In all except one school we were in a classroom, so the audience was less than three feet away. Scary! Adult Child Dead Child (Claire Dowie) is under an hour long and the classes to whom we were playing were timetabled for a double lesson, one and a half hours, so we were to finish the session with a discussion. At least that would show us if the audience had understood! So we arrived at Wuppertal's Gymnasium Kothen for the first performance with a fair amount of nervousness (fear!). I kept one eye on the book and one on the audience, and I was relieved to see that most (not all, I'm afraid) seemed to be following, or at least pretending that they were. There were even some laughs in the right places - and not just from the staff! In the post-performance session it became obvious why they concentrated so hard: they've undertaken a project which involves creating a play and were having major problems translating their ideas into dramatic form, so we ended up workshopping some of their ideas and at the end of the lesson they went away with lots of ideas - and their comments made it clear that the vast majority had understood most of the play. That was confirmed when we played the Gymnasium Siegerstrasse where the discussion focus was on the play itself and, in particular, the twin themes of child abuse and schizophrenia. Did we do anything special or different because we were in a foreign country playing to non-native English speakers? We didn't, although the German teachers had suggested that the cast might speak more slowly than usual. We thought about it. We even tried it, but it made a nonsense of the play. So we decided to risk playing at the normal pace, and the risk paid off. Good theatre - and this was good theatre, otherwise I wouldn't have agreed to take it to Germany (or anywhere else, for that matter) - communicates effectively across language barriers. Way back in the 1970s I saw a production of Beckett's Endgame done entirely in Welsh. At the time I didn't know the play at all and my knowledge of Welsh was (still is!) limited to a small number of words and phrases, and yet I responded to it. Our audiences had been learning English since the age of 11 (some since 7), so it was a risk worth taking - and it paid off handsomely. Articles Indices: |
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