| International Theatre, for Children in Wales |
Arad Goch |
| Theatr Arad Goch, et. al. Agor Drysau , Aberystwyth Arts Centre , March 25, 2003 |
| The potential impact of Agor Drysau (Open Doors), Wales’ biennial International Festival of Theatre for Young Audiences, upon the future of local theatre should not be underestimated. At Agor Drysau, many children may see professional live theatre for the first or nearly the first time in their lives, forming impressions that may help them decide whether theatre is boring or exciting, exclusionary or welcoming. Some might be fascinated enough to get the drama bug, and in the near future we’ll see them create culture-making and culture-changing theatre. I saw three of the festival’s many pieces from Wales, Ireland, and continental Europe: The Lazy Ant, by Wales’ own Spectacle Theatre; Eventyr pa Alvej, or Topsy Turvy Tales, (Teater Morgana, Denmark), and The Happy Prince (Teatro Aida, Italy). * * * Attempting to appropriate the point of view of the target age groups, I found Spectacle’s The Lazy Ant, written by Mark Ryan and directed by Steve Davies, to be by far the most effective and engrossing show of those I saw. Throughout it, the children leaned forward toward the actors, precariously balanced and totally attentive, as Enid Grufudd, transformed into an ant by the addition of a shiny black bicycle helmet and prosthetic legs made of cardboard tubing and stiff tape, learned not to stray away from the ant colony that allegorically represents a primary school. Davies and the cast warmed the audience up by kneeling on the floor in front of them and talking to them individually about the subject of insects, and clearly really listening to their observations and opinions. The Lazy Ant was devised for audiences aged 3-5, but the ingenuity of the insect costumes should excite and inspire theatre practitioners and any adults required to accompany children to the theatre. Spectacle will continuing touring The Lazy Ant across Wales, and also perform a Welsh-language version. I was ambivalent about the fact that the two ants, who are exhorted to stick together for the security of the younger one, look exactly alike, in terms of costume, and the characters who repulse or threaten the little ant, such as the carnivorous Beetle (Carys Parry) are all different species. It is possible to conclude that this play subliminally broadcasts nasty messages about sticking with one’s group, or with others of similar physical appearance, because to do otherwise invites destruction; but it did not seem that the children interpreted the story this way, and that subtext seems entirely accidental on Ryan’s part. Spectacle’s intentions might be clarified in further development. Still, although we have all heard truisms about the necessity for theatre to create dialogue and fire spectators’ imaginations, in this play, Spectacle fulfils both these objectives. * * * Teater Morgana’s Topsy Turvy Tales shows the struggle of a nameless ‘Storyteller’ (Margit Szlavik) to impart to a sceptical ‘Book Collector’ (Kaj Pederson) her appreciation for the tales her grandmother passed down to her orally. This storyline functions as an organizing framework to showcase Szlavik and Pederson’s zany antics more than as a suspense plot. It is easy to forget the Storyteller’s campaign and the Book Collector’s resistance as one is engrossed by their plastic facial expressions, highly stylised, puppet-like choreography, surreally beautiful white, red, and black costumes and set, and winsome willingness to make themselves look silly. One gets the sense throughout that something—many things—in these characters’ realm are not quite as usual: garbled, overturned, topsy-turvy. The two actors are dressed as nineteenth-century children, the original audiences of the Grimms, Hoffmann, and Denmark’s national hero Hans Christian Andersen, but in their tales they robotically hum Disney tunes and mention a ‘moped.’ The set looks like an oversized puppet theatre, and human actors perform in it. The artifice is obvious and unapologetic. A brief, unbelievably racist impression of a Peking opera singer—a screeching, staring automaton that moved like a wind-up toy—was disheartening, but with that solitary exception the piece is innovative, risk-taking, and beautiful. Near the end, Pederson tells a Chinese folktale that features a marvelous, complex mural, represented onstage as a blank white scrim. He points to the scrim, and rhapsodises about the mural’s composition, leaving it to the actors to complete the work of art in the mind’s eye; to exercise their imaginations as vigorously as the actors exercise theirs. Teater Morgana distributed publicity for some of their other productions. Though I could not read the Danish copy, their production stills look every bit as surreal and captivating as their Agor Drysau performance, and I would like to see any other show they might tour in this country. * * * Like Topsy Turvy Tales, Teatro Aida’s The Happy Prince represents a reconciliation of written and oral storytelling traditions. “I am going to tell you a story out of paper,” solo performer Oreste Castagna introduces himself to his audience of mostly primary school children, “because I am a paper-story-teller.” He then takes out a pair of safety scissors and proceeds to transform a stack of brightly coloured paper into the talking birds and other creatures that populate this tale from The House of Pomegranates, Oscar Wilde’s 1887 collection of stories for children. Castagna’s artistic process intriguingly recalls his protagonist’s: in Wilde’s story, as you may know, a bird gathers funding to alleviate poverty in a coastal southern Mediterranean city by picking bits of metal off of a statue reminiscent of the Colossus of Rhodes, which is animated by the spirit of the long-deceased titular prince. Apparently echoing the tale’s imagery, Castagna away excess paper to create his puppets—and then at the end distributes them among the schoolchildren in the audience, sailing some of the remarkably aerodynamic birds out into the auditorium. He succeeds in transforming Wilde’s eclectic concoction of didactic tale, martyrology, and blazon into a celebration of the artist’s ability to reveal hidden images by taking things to pieces and by stripping them down to their essential forms. That, at least is what this reviewer saw in Castagna’s performance. Unfortunately, most of the schoolchildren in the audience seemed baffled and bored. Much of the plot was not clearly communicated, for example, that ‘the Prince’ (as Wilde always calls the character) is not a human being, but a statue, albeit a conscious, sentient, and vocal one. A series of puppet shows inside illuminated crates decorated like dollhouses was meant to show the recipients of the bird and Prince’s welfare scheme, but were too small and too far upstage for the contents to be recognised from the back of the auditorium. In any case, that element of the story is the most alienating and annoyingly myopic. The destitute of the city include a ‘match girl,’ whose trade most of the young audience probably do not read as a signifier of homelessness; and a lonesome playwright scribbling for pennies in (where else?) a freezing garret. I really wondered what Castagna could do with a different source story. He has a lot of creativity, resourcefulness, insight, and warmth as a storyteller, but it was disappointing that the children brought to experience it were more excited about the post-show gift lottery than by his tale itself. |
Reviewed by: Rebecca Nesvet |
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