The British Theatre Guide: Show in a Hurry (2)

School & Youth Theatre

Show in a Hurry (2)

Since there had to be music involved, the first thing was to check with Freda what she had in repertoire which would be suitable. So, with some trepidation, I told her what the DH had said. She took it rather more clamly than me, but then she would: all she had to do was pull something out of repertoire and leave the rest to me!

Anyway, I looked at the list she gave me and the only thing that gave me any inspiration at all was a medley (lasting about twelve-fifteen minutes) of songs from The Lion King. Obviously we couldn't do bits from the show. Apart from it not being available for performance, it is too major an undertaking even to consider. Still, it did give me an idea.

Animals!

Carol, the DH, has a thing about animal stories and uses them all the time in Key Stage 3 assemblies, so I borrowed the books she uses and started to read.

Nothing. Zilch. Zero. Niente. Rien.

Nothing appealed. There was nothing I could see me turning into a piece of theatre. It was two days before the first idea came - Androcles and the Lion. But when I sat down to try to write something, I couldn't come up with anything that I liked. It was all trite, boring, an uninspiring children's story. So I decided that the only way to try to develop something was to workshop it. But when? I'd promised Freda - as I did every year - that she could have my Drama Club nights for her rehearsals, and I knew she relied upon them, particularly since the band and choir had to be ready long before the Carol Service, because they perform in the town's main street and at a local supermarket on a number of occasions. When? When? When?

Time to incur the wrath of the rest of the staff again! Get the Year 8 DC members to work with me during the Y6 parents evening. Of course they'd all promised other staff they'd be with them but were all keen to come to me instead. So I told them to ask the other staff to be excused.

Of course they didn't. They told them! So I had to go around smoothing ruffled feathers, pleading urgent necessity, promising reparation, mortgaging goodwill for the next twenty years...

But they came and we got to work. We played around with the story, acted it out, thought of jokes to go with it. A couple of the Year 11s arrived and offered their suggestions, and gradually ideas began to emerge. The Y6 parents who were wandering around seemed to find it quite fascinating, so we were killing two birds with one stone.

However it soon became obvious that this wasn't going to be enough. It was much too short: we were going to need something else. Much head-scratching followed, until one girl said, "Mary had a little lamb." We all looked at her as if she was daft. Eh?

"Why not do Mary Had a Little Lamb?" she said.

More discussion followed and then she piped up again. "How about the lamb somehow getting into an oven and being burned? We could say that that's how Mary's little lamb turned in to Baa Baa Black Sheep!"

That was just sick enough to appeal to everyone! (Including, I have to say, me.)

The evening ended but the seeds were planted and eventually the ideas began to flow:

Try to include as many nursery rhymes as possible
Start off in a school
Make it an ensemble piece with no single major part

And ideas came for the Androcles segment, too:

A Roman entertainment impressario
The arena like a wrestling ring

And so the script came together. It took about a week to write (in among all the other things that had to be done) but we only managed four rehearsals so I went to the boss and explained the situation. Could I have an afternoon to rehearse? We wouldn't ask for cover: we'd bring our classes with us - there was method in this madness: we'd use them as the junior audience and practise getting a reaction from them.

As soon as I said we wouldn't want cover, he agreed. I told the kids to ask the staff who taught them that afternoon for permission and all went well, until one kid - a quite, unassuming girl - came to tell me that one teacher wouldn't let her out. He didn't believe her. He thought, in fact, that she was lying. I had to write a note explaining everything and then he'd think about it.

I was not happy. I was decidedly unhappy. So I had a word with his Head of Department. Should I speak to him or would she? "I think I'd better," she said. "I'd like to keep him in one piece."

So we got our afternoon's rehearsal and the following day we did the show at the primary school The only parents who turned up were those who had kids in the show as well as in the junior school, but the staff and kids were enthusiastic and I'm told that in the days afterwards more names were added to the list of those who chose to come to our school next year.