Regents Park Open Air Theatre

All the school’s a stage

With its wooden gym benches and its hand-made art objects, the hall of St Vincent’s RC Primary School doesn’t look much like a theatre. But together with a few freezer labels and some laminated flash cards, it apparently provides all of the scenery needed for Daniel – an actor with the British Shakespeare Company – to immerse 23 restless 10-year-olds in the Bard’s most spine-tingling tragedy, Macbeth.

Enter Class 4. They’ve never seen or read the play before – “We got the scripts a few days ago, but all the children know is that it’s a Shakespeare workshop,” their teacher explains – but there’s no real danger of today’s session running into the actors’ curse associated with ‘the Scottish play’. They’re in good hands. The session is part of a new initiative being run by the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre and funded by the Howard de Walden Estate – the first time that the theatre has got involved with local schools. The scheme also involves a similar access project for the nearby St Marylebone secondary school.

“We are going to put on a play together, and all of you guys are going to play all of the parts,” says Daniel. “I need you to use your imaginations a lot, to imagine what the different characters might be thinking, what they might be feeling, try to predict what they might do next. Our story takes place on a heath in Scotland. Put your hand up and tell me what you think a heath might be…”

After quickly resolving some small confusion between ‘heaths’, ‘hearths’ and ‘hay bales’, Daniel continues by asking the children to create in their minds the setting for that most chilling of opening lines: “When shall we three meet again?”
Five minutes later, the gym has turned into an extension of northern Scotland, overrun with beasts, plants, an incredible variety of weather fronts and even – when Daniel ventures to suggest there may be something more unusual lurking in the woods than foxes – the odd Trojan Horse.

The class moves on at pace. Condensing three hours of genius into a child-friendly workshop is no mean feat when you’ve only got until lunchtime, and with three apparitions and several more murders still to go Daniel has his work cut out.

The first two ‘acts’ are a flurry of activity. “It’s fun, and accessible, and the children are loving it,” beams the St Vincent’s headteacher, Miss Coleman. “Drama is a big part of our curriculum, so the children are used to performing and public speaking, but this is something we could never afford to do without help.”

For both of the schools involved in the initiative, the activity sessions are being followed by the pupils visiting the theatre to watch the play they’ve just studied – The Crucible in the case of St Marylebone – with their eyes and minds already opened up to the experience. In a few weeks time Years 3, 4 and 5 are off to see Macbeth – a welcome treat for the pupils and staff who, despite the close proximity of the venue, have never previously had the funds to be able to visit en masse.

Come break time, the play is taking shape. The main roles have been cast (a slightly chaotic affair, based largely around frenetic hand-raising), the children are off for their snacks, and the coffee-flavoured comfort of the staff room seems the perfect place for discussing how Daniel ended up an ardent ambassador of Shakespeare.
“Drama school was where I first got into Shakespeare,” he says. “I just thought, this is it. I could do this for the rest of my life and be happy.” A brief stint as Paris in an outdoor Romeo and Juliet – “the weather was awful. I remember laying in the wet grass in full Elizabethan costume, including tights, and wondering how I had got here” – and a national tour as Banquo in Macbeth eventually led to Daniel taking A Midsummer Night’s Dream into schools to introduce young people to Shakespeare. It was good, but incredibly hard. “That play is just maddening – people falling in love all over the place, strange names, the fast pace of a comedy.”

While A Midsummer Night’s Dream never failed to amuse, it soon became clear that giggling at slapstick and understanding Shakespeare were two very different things. Macbeth may have fewer laughs (though given Class 4’s hysterics over the ingredients in the witches’ brew it still has its comedy moments), but after two months of taking it into schools, Daniel believes it’s a much better play for everyone.
“Macbeth has much more of a story to it. It has a clear plot, with layers, and you can talk about the  emotions involved without the children getting all  awkward and squirmy about ‘falling in love’, as they do in Midsummers. That was always a bit of a nightmare.”

With break over, it’s back to the gym / Scottish castle, and the ear-splitting shouting  match that is the Royal Entrance of the Macbeths. “All Hail, King of Scotland!” “All Hail, Queen of Scotland!” bellow the guests, relishing the fully-sanctioned opportunity to shout as loud as they possibly can. As real life catering staff set up tables in the corner, a diminutive Lady Macbeth entreats her guests to sit and “take a measure round”. Seconds later, and the air is filled with the enthusiastic sounds of gobbling and belching. Eating and drinking to excess are not, it seems, a part of Shakespeare that children struggle to empathise with.

A little harder to digest, however, are some of the laminated prompt cards Daniel hands around afterwards. Divided into groups of three or four, the class is going to act out a heated exchange between Macbeth, who can see Banquo’s blood-spattered ghost, and his bewildered wife, who can’t.
“Hands up if you don’t understand the words on your card!” says Daniel, as several groups begin an involved discussion on the possible meanings of “prithee”. Hands shoot up and Daniel starts translating. “Well ‘locks’ means hair, and gory means its all rather bloody and disgusting. So ‘Never shake thy gory locks at me’ means exactly that: Macbeth is telling Banquo not to shake his bloody and filthy head at him.”

Squeals of delighted disgust follow this revelation, and the next group looks positively disappointed to discover that “lo” – from the king’s heartfelt entreaty “behold! look! lo!” – is simply a variation on “look”.

It may not be Olivier at the Old Vic – “this is the very painting of your fear” turns out to be a bit of a tongue twister – but it’s fantastic considering how alien some of the words must have seemed. “I always leave the original language in,” says Daniel, “even if the children ask if they can put it in their own words. This is Shakespeare.”

Empathy, projection and the power of language are key. The bits of Shakespeare that children seem to absorb best are those they can relate to and act out themselves. Questions designed to get the class thinking about a character’s motives and reactions are often met with great gasps of recognition. What does Prince Malcolm do when King Duncan’s been murdered? “Run away,” is the popular answer, though a bolder comrade does suggest the prince simply “destroy his crown”. When Daniel asks what the people of Scotland might think when the prince disappears, a little girl who has yet to speak so far is bursting to tell us that “they think that he killed his dad.”

“When we go through Lady Macbeth washing her hands as she sleepwalks, it amazes me how much they get into her mind,” says Daniel. “They know it’s the guilt getting to her – that that’s why she has blood on her hands.”
The children’s pulses are quickened by Daniel’s relentless pursuit of atmosphere. Hall pillars become oak trees, lunchtime’s hot plates become the castle gate. As Daniel carefully steers the fleeing Prince Malcolm over two boys (Hadrian’s Wall), the advantage of being guided by a man accustomed to performing without the ‘four walls’ of a conventional theatre become more and more apparent.

“Planes, birds, ball games, weather – these are an everyday part of performing in the open air,” Daniel explains. “so keeping audiences focused is a big part of the challenge.” Today, Daniel’s rapt little following is anything but distracted. Talk of castle forcefields and witch terminators may have taken us beyond the Bard’s frame of reference, but the sentiments expressed were nothing but Shakespearian. Shakespeare was, after all, the man Samuel Johnson declared to be “not for an age, but for all time”.
 

The heart of Marylebone