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Interviews
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"I'm So Lucky" Sheila Connor talks to librettist Jenifer Toksvig It was almost lunch time when I arrived at the boarding school where I had arranged to interview librettist Jenifer Toksvig, but rehearsals were still in full swing for the production of Terry Pratchett’s Mort to be performed by youngsters from Youth Music Theatre UK, and the large school hall was a hive of activity. “We are very lucky,” said Toksvig, “to have the use of so much space here” and the hungry teenage thespians also showed their appreciation of lunch provided by the kitchen staff. Luck, she thinks, has played a large part in her life. She was very lucky to have worked at the Yvonne Arnaud, lucky that Artistic Director James Barber had no hesitation in allowing her as a young unknown writer to take over the main stage for her first show, and extremely lucky to be commissioned by the YMTUK to write.
“I’m so lucky – I walked into the YMTUK office when I first met them and they said, 'We’d like you to write for us, what would you like to write?' No one else in the world would ever say that to you – the most lucky thing for a writer to hear – and I said I’d like to do the Discworld (I’m a huge fan) but we’d have to ask Terry’s permission and we didn’t know if we would get it, but he was so generous with it and very hands-off, allowing us to do whatever we would like to do with it. We hope he’s coming to see the show, but I’m a little bit nervous”.
I can’t help feeling that a great deal of talent, dedication and hard work has improved her luck no end, but Fortune was definitely smiling on her the day she walked down her village street and came across a man carrying a large shark. Here was the answer to the problem of how to represent Death onstage, and before local puppet maker Richard Johnston knew what was happening he found himself creating an eight foot skeleton - and very realistic it is too, I can vouch for that having now met Death, courtesy of Daniel. I forgot to ask what happened to the shark.
Toksvig was a performer at a very young age, but then turned to stage management (studying at Mountview) and believes that experience with both these fields helped a lot with her writing. It was when stage manager for the Yvonne Arnaud Youth Theatre that she wrote her first show and from there went to University in New York to study musical theatre writing, returning to live in Guildford, her home for many years, and her first four musicals were performed at the Yvonne Arnaud.
“I was very lucky,” she says again. “I worked with the Youth Theatre for four years and you can really learn from working with young people. They can never really (as good as they are) make a bad line work in the way that a professional actor can, so you can really hear when the writing’s not working, but also it’s lovely because they give you great feedback and we encourage the collaborative process. We have lots of sessions in the rehearsal period where I’ve said we need to cut some of this dialogue and make it a little bit cleaner – can you help me with that? They’re very smart – very stage savvy!”
With no children of her own Toksvig considers these youngsters her family and the show her ‘baby’, but she also lays claim to her sister’s three teenagers, and, being a very close family, they all helped by reading for her with Sandi playing Death, while their mother has gained the title ‘Patron of The Arts’, mainly it seems by doing the food shopping
In their most ambitious project to date, YMTUK auditioned at major cities all over the country to choose from over a thousand entrants those suitable to perform in the new works they had commissioned, so these youngsters are, as Toksvig says, the cream of the crop.
“They are all tremendously talented young people and you don’t want to waste any of that and you try to focus everybody individually if you canl. Mort’s character gives you Death’s overview of life – an objective view – all the different crowds and society, so that’s very useful for when you’ve got a big chorus, and there are lots of smaller parts which is very important for a company like this where you want to give everybody a chance to show their talent.”
There are thirty five performers in this show, ages ranging from twelve to twenty, and three will be in the band with two as assistant managers. Some will go on to work professionally, and already have places at theatrical colleges, but there is a lovely mixture of people who do it just for fun. The first day consists of ‘getting to know you’ games, and the second is auditions for parts – then it’s straight into long working days. They really need their food to keep up the energy levels.
When I first arrived there was a group singing around the piano and I commented that the music, though beautiful, sounded very difficult. She considered this for a moment.
“Well, when I first wrote a show for children – and these were young eight to twelve year olds – we put in a four part harmony section, just one verse, and wondered if they could cope………we needn't have worried, they were fine! Now Dominic (Haslam) and I write as if we were writing for professional adults…….we don’t write down for children, they’re not stupid………but when we do something like this we have the luxury of saying this is exactly how we would like the show to be if it was in the West End, and we ask the young people to do it – and they do! “They’re amazing – not just complex musical harmony, but also complex understanding of comedy – how to land a joke – all of those things. Once you explain to them ‘this is why that pause is funny’ - they get it, and they do it.”
Although she was trying to eat lunch at the same time as answering my questions, Toksvig felt she had to also talk about Mercury Musical Development, an organisation which supports and encourages musical theatre writers with seminars and lectures, and offers writing opportunities where producers will go and offer a commission – she was commissioned to write a show about Nelson. It forms a community of people with the same experiences – “quite a small circle, but people you can call if you’ve just had a rejection letter for a show and it’s good for your craft because you can’t write a musical if you’re not actively writing and seeing them with actors…… Without these things you’re very isolated.”
Were there any problems with actually staging a show which is such a fantasy? “Well,” she says, looking pointedly at Clive Paget, “the director made me cut the flying horse!”
Jenifer talks very fast, and eats lunch fast too. It’s a case of getting on with the important things in life – the show and the children. Mort opens at the Yvonne Arnaud theatre on 20th August and it promises to be an unforgettable experience for both audience and performers, but she already has her next project in mind – an adaptation of her sister’s book about family experiences in wartime occupied Denmark. Her motto would appear to be ‘keep learning, keep sharing and keep doing’.
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