Children’s theatre is a wonderful way of imparting our culture and other cultures into the minds of children.
Children reading books get that but that’s on the wane isn’t it.
To see it, to hear the music of India, say, to hear a folk story from India is a…a better way of infecting a child with this wonderful culture of a wonderful country.
We do not think that anything other than an immersive film has this impact on children. Reading books, yes. Immersive film, yes.
But Children’s theatre has a unique opportunity to communicate live with children and stimulate their fascination with the world.
Theatre is a bit more than polite plays with actors speaking the lines and not falling over the furniture and the gritty social realism that was becoming popular.
So I thought, I want to write a play about the plight of Tibet.
I suddenly realised I’ll do it for children because children love colour and music
and all the stunts and tricks that i’d seen in the world theatre season.
So I wrote a play called “The Midnight Child” and offered it to Carol Jenner who had just taken the lease on the Arts Theatre,
the first operation of children’s theatre in London, and from then on, honestly, everything I’ve written has been for children.
It offered the possibility of adventurous acting of a sort that was almost absent in the 1960’s in England.
In 1965 I was appointed to run the drama department at Dartington and there at Dartington with it’s beautiful theatre
which I was running, I met Liz my wife, extremely gifted theatre designer and we thought the obvious thing to do was to get married and to found the theatre company.
In 1967 we came to London, bought a house in Clapham as a headquarters for the newly created company POLKA!
I wrote the plays, we found the company, we rehearsed them, we went to the English regional theatres and it was unbelievably successful,
full houses, twelve shows a week, wherever we went in the theatres it sold out.
Within two years we had a full season 42 weeks of the year on tour, we were always fully booked in the finest theatres,
not the commercial theatres, always the regional theatres i.e the subsidised theatres who were a wonder of the theatre world at the time
and after five or six years of this we thought England needs a national children’s theatre.
We settled on South London because of the circular road and it’s ease of access for people coming from all over England.
There is a lot of lovely parkland in Wimbledon it’s the perfect place to establish a theatre for children.
I had my office immediately beside the door to the theatre so that any visitor could knock on the door and say “that was a great show” or “that was a terrible show”.
The children could come and talk if they wanted to.
I thought this was important to be in constant touch with the audience, so my main office was beside the main entrance to the theatre.
And if there’s a real joy it is the chatter of excited children coming into the theatre passing by and the chatter…thrilled to the core children going by out of the theatre
equally the wonderful roars of mass laughter in the audience, the hushed silence in the audience when something serious was happening
this pulpable effect on children is my best and greatest memory of Polka.
