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Two of the Theatre Cap-a-Pie actors at Clavering Primary School in Hartlepool during one of the Creative Partnerships Tees Valley workshops Photo by Tony Griffiths

Godot in the Primary School

Dateline: 29th October, 2006

"I have seen the expression that passes over people’s faces when you tell them what we’re planning; we’re going to use a stage play to inform the whole curriculum of two classes of eight year olds. Those children’s ideas will essentially shape a professional production of the play. That play is the existential Waiting for Godot. Famously, nothing happens in the play. We like a challenge."

So wrote Jessica Tyler whose job it was to document the project. The company was Theatre Cap-a-Pie, based in Dipton in County Durham, about twelve miles south west of Newcastle, between Stanley and Consett. The company's director, Gordon Poad, desribes out the prject came about:

A couple of years ago I was wandering through the streets of Durham City with my family when we happened, to come across a theatre showing a student production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. My daughter Lulu, then seven, wasn’t keen on going in; “It sounds boring!”
So we agreed that, if it was, we’d leave at the interval. Just before the interval I whispered to Lulu, “Do you want to leave?”
But she was really enjoying it.
“It’s about life, isn’t it dad? And about death, and, and…Why don’t they do something?”

He met with Alison Clark-Jenkins, Creative Director and Claire Frawley, Programme Manager for Creative Partnerships Tees Valley:

We talked about two primary schools in Hartlepool; Clavering and Brougham, who were both interested in establishing a Creative Curriculum.

It was at this point that we began discussing the Take One Picture project set up by the National Gallery in London ten years ago. As the discussion progressed we examined the possibility of working in a similar way with a Take One Text idea; taking Waiting for Godot into schools and using this text to inform all areas of the children’s work.

What I’m interested in for Cap-a-Pie is how the process of working with two primary schools can inform a professional production, and whether this process works better than just a company of actors and a director going into a rehearsal room. Throughout the project we will also be asking whether it is possible that the schools can gain from working alongside us in the development of their creative curricula, and, if they do, essentially we will have achieved a two for one outcome.

So the company - director, designer and actors - set out on a journey of discovery which is documented on its website.

Did it work? Tony Metcalfe, Head Teacher of Clavering Primary School, thinks so.

"I first thought that it would be impossible for this play to be adapted for pupils as young as seven-years old," he told the BBC. "I've been pleasantly surprised to discover that young children have an amazing depth for internalising situations and an immense capacity for absorbing creativity.

"The role of the teacher has come a long way - we now have to tap into the areas where young people are given the additional freedom to express themselves and Waiting for Godot was a brilliant example of the new brand of creative education."

"Clavering and Brougham primary schools have left their thumb prints on our version of Waiting for Godot," says Poad. "It's their interpretation and direction of Beckett's work that has proven to be our inspiration and the young's people's creativity makes up the DNA of the play."

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©Peter Lathan 2006