Oral Histories

I first encountered Polka in 1991, so that’s, what, thirty years? And I carried on going regularly over thirty years, so that’s a lot of productions [laughs]. I think I first went for a meeting, shortly after I’d started working for the Children’s Theatre Association and the British centre of ASSITEJ. I walked in the door and was just overwhelmed by the fact that it was so child-centred, as a building. I’ve always had a particular attraction to the Adventure Theatre, which is going to be slightly bigger, but was a very small, intimate space, where you were so close, as an audience member, to the actors that you could literally reach out and touch them. I sort of reverted to childhood as I walked in, and I was ‘I want to sit in the train! I want to sit in the train!’ as small people round about me were doing. And then the garden – there was a beautiful cat you could climb on, called Orlando, there was a house, kind of a tree-house but on the floor, there was an amazing slide. And I walked about, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, I think – and then had the joy of taking my niece, not long after, she was about four at the time. She just walked in and said, ‘Oh, Auntie Sarah, I don’t ever want to go home! I want to live here forever!’ I talked about the Adventure Theatre and that proximity to the audience, but even upstairs [in the main house] you could tell children were really excited by ‘I can actually see those real live people at such close quarters.’ And so many of the fantastic actors who have that incredible rapport, through the fourth wall, not necessarily direct address to the children, though sometimes it is, but just a real sense of connection, that realisation that it isn’t a screen, that they can affect, and can be heard and be seen by the actors. I think that’s a real excitement for children, that live-ness of the theatre experience. I’m a freelancer, so I’ve made three productions there now, there was Grandad, Me and Teddy Too in 2014. The second piece I made was called Shake, Rattle and Roll, part of the Brainwaves Festival in 2016, which was inviting a number of artists to work with neuroscientists, to explore how neuroscience and theatre might work together. And I had the joy and privilege of working with the Baby Lab at Birkbeck University, making a new piece for babies that was informed by all their research into babies aged six to eighteen months. And then in 2017 another piece where we worked with children in schools and children’s centres in Merton, gathering their stories about their siblings. It was a piece that ended up being called My Brother, My Sister and Me. So we did a lot of work gathering verbatim their stories from children about their irritation with their siblings, or their joy at playing with their siblings; and we used a lot of their words verbatim in the piece. I’ve created a number of pieces where we’ve devised, made up, the story of the characters, the situations, in the rehearsal room. For example, I made a piece called Boxy and Sticky, and all we knew in advance was that one of the characters was going to have a box, because it’s got so much play value – you can be in it, outside it, underneath it, stick it on your head, jump into it – and the other was going to have a stick. Because a stick gives you so many imaginative possibilities – turn it into a horse, turn it into a magic wand, etcetera etcetera. So that was what we started from, and then myself and the actors and the composer created the piece in the rehearsal room. That is a really tiring process in some ways. Normal rehearsal times in the theatre are 10.00 am to 6.00 pm. Day One you can start at ten, but Day Two you probably have to get up quite early, because at 6.00 o’clock you’ve gone home and you’ve been typing up all the material that you created that day and filtering through your notes, and then you get up early the next morning and spend time processing that, and planning what you’re going to do on Day Two. So during a devising process like that, and given that I’m now nearly fifty-six, I’m not certain how much longer I can carry on doing this! Often getting four hours’ sleep a night, going to bed at one or two and getting up at six. I always hope that a rehearsal room is a playful environment, where people feel they can experiment, they can try things, they can get them wrong and that there’s no value judgement. Because it’s only by being playful, and uninhibited, that you sometimes come up with really lovely moments of theatre. So that would be a devising piece rehearsal, would be that. A scripted piece is where you’ve either been given a script by a writer or where I’ve written a script in advance, is slightly less tiring, because if you’ve done Scene One on Day One, you can do Scene Two on Day Two. Then there’s the lovely moments where you start taking the work into the theatre itself. And start adding sound and lights and smell effects and petal drops, or whatever it might be. Those are often long days – that’s historically been the long days in theatre. They can often be twelve, thirteen hour days. And you end up – particularly in the Adventure Theatre – lying on the carpet at the end of the day, just going ahhhh! we feel really satisfied, because it’s transformed things, and enhanced things, and looks beautiful, but oh you were tired. And then between times, when I’m writing, that’s been at home, or in cafes, or if the weather’s nice sitting in parks with a laptop or a notebook – or observing children, quite often, to feed in to the work. I think so much of the work, when you’re making for children, is also about talking to children, observing children, looking at family dynamics, looking at peer group dynamics, that can feed into the physicalising of children by adult actors, or the scripts for the ideas within the piece. It’s a really lovely lifestyle in many ways – it’s financially very precarious [laughs] but full of stimulation and creativity and – yeah. There’s a really interesting thing that’s happened occasionally, when I’ve been directing a show for children at a major rep, or a theatre that doesn’t specialise in children’s theatre, where you know that, sadly, there are some people in the building who don’t value work for children as highly as they value work for adults. And there can be a slightly patronising tone towards you. When you go to Polka, you know that that’s something you don’t have to worry about. Everybody in that building is passionately committed to children’s experience of engaging with theatre. I will be honest that when you work in theatre for children, there’s a particular slant of the head, and a particular tone of voice, that you experience fairly regularly, when you tell people what you do. It’s kind of ‘Oh, that’s so lovely, that’s so worthwhile, so you’re making theatre for the audiences of the future?’ Which we all counter with ‘No, we’re making theatre for the audiences now.’ And there’s a hope that yes, we hope that we’ll create in them a desire to carry on engaging with theatre, but that’s not our primary aim. Our primary aim is to give them theatrical experience here, now, at the age they are now. And I think it’s so special that [at Polka] the whole building is geared towards children, the programme is geared towards children, the whole staff are committed to children. You can take that as a given. People at Polka, and the building’s philosophy of engaging with families and children, that I’ve absorbed into my own practice and been able to take to other places – so you really need to think about ‘if you’ve got a very small child, what happens the minute you set foot through that door?’ It’s not just the show itself – it’s everything about ‘where do the buggies go? Where do you change the nappies, where do you put the dirty nappies? Can you get a bottle heated?’ All those things that as a dedicated space for children, and with a specific commitment to early years work, Polka has been at the forefront of developing during its history. So I’m really privileged to have learned so much from the people there. It’s a big Polka family of those of us who are champions of, advocates for, passionate about theatre for children.