We don"t need no theatre in education: let"s get kids commissioning our plays

Leave them kids alone? Never. The Commissioners sees professional playwrights commissioned to write new plays by schoolchildren. Photograph: Company of Angels

This might be a good time to be a kid whose parents or teachers have the means and inclination to buy theatre tickets. Venues and artists seem more excited about challenging young audiences – from the Royal Court’s teen-leaning adaptation of Let The Right One In to Complicite’s first children’s show. Lyn Gardner is among those arguing that it’s time our culture took children’s theatre more seriously and Purni Morell, artistic director of the Unicorn, recently told the Guardian: “plays for children should be judged the same way as plays for adults.”

But what of the theatre that happens inside our schools? For many, it remains a lethal cocktail: exam-focused trudges through ‘classic’ texts, rickety productions of bland musicals and – greatest horror – visiting educational theatre companies who bastardise humanity’s ultimate forum for reflecting on itself, to teach you something about chemistry or French.

Don’t blame the teachers; they’re drowning in a culture of curriculum relevance and learning objectives. Theatremakers? Approach many a writer or actor about working in a school and they’ll recite something about theatre’s wonderful educational potential, while privately wondering if their bank balance is healthy enough to say no.

But my experience over the past few years at Company of Angels has convinced me that schools can be both a starting point, and setting, for extraordinary acts of theatre. A compelling idea is taking root: that the only theatre in education really worth making is where art comes first, and education is a happy accident.

Ask Steven Bloomer, whose first plays were produced by HighTide festival and the Factory theatre company, what distinguishes meaningful theatre from misguided ‘educational’ work, and his response is simple: “Good plays ask questions rather than give answers.”

Avoid relevance

Bloomer is one of 10 writers to have taken part in The Commissioners, our programme in which professional playwrights are taken into schools where young people ‘commission’ them to write a new short play. The thinking is simple: young people get a writer who can articulate what they’re thinking about; writers get access to a roomful of young minds.

The main instruction to Commissioners playwrights is: avoid relevance – characters need not be their audience’s age, nor locations limited to teenage bedrooms or fast food joints. Stewart Melton set his play in a menacing dystopia where women are rewarded for producing four or more children; the playwright-poet Katie Bonna had a young audience enthralled as a grown woman struggled (in verse) to rebuild her identity after learning that her father had started another family.

For Bloomer, whose work with teenagers at Southwark College yielded Holes, a moving account of a girl leaving London for the first time to attend the funeral of a father she never knew, the greatest benefit was “the visceral sense of being in the room with the young people”. As well as “open-ended conversation,” Bloomer had his commissioners write him anonymous letters in which they shared insights they might not have voiced in front of their peers.

As part of the process, writers return to their group with a draft – the young people become script editors, demanding rewrites where anything lacks the ring of truth. Schools have confirmed that despite ticking no single curriculum box, work like this has clear educational benefits. Participants speak and write what they feel; they are taken outside the usual milieu of teachers, timetables and learning objectives, working alongside professional artists. Their ideas and experiences inform the playwright’s work and they can rightly feel ownership of the resulting play.

But these benefits are the fortunate collateral of the programme’s main objective, which is to enable playwrights to take the pulse of a generation and reflect it in their work. When we stage the play for the young people who commissioned it (and as many of their peers as timetables permit), it is always with professional actors. Subsequently, though, we grant the school rights to the script – pupils mount their own versions; teachers gain a new classroom text.

‘Schools are where the future rehearses itself’

We’re not alone in our thinking. For almost a decade, playwright Fin Kennedy has been a fixture at Mulberry School for Girls, a forward-thinking secondary school in London’s Tower Hamlets. He’s written plays for pupils to perform, taught scriptwriting courses to young people and teachers, and is now bringing in a stream of other writers, whom he’s training to develop similar relationships with other schools.

When I speak to Kennedy, he is gearing up to write a play for Mulberry to take to the 2014 Edinburgh fringe, a follow-up to their 2009 collaboration, which won a Fringe First. “It’s inevitable that education takes place,” he says. “In the years we go to Edinburgh, exam results for English and drama shoot up. There’s a buzz in the school. Soft outcomes are hard to measure but it’s blindingly obvious when you see it up close.”

But his motivation goes beyond an uplift to drama teaching. “Teenagers are exciting to write for,” he says. “And schools are where the future rehearses itself. If you want to see what the future looks like, go to a secondary school. It’s the cutting edge.”

Kennedy speaks of a “critical mass” of talented new writers “waiting tables” between commissions. “Get them into schools,” he says. “Give them an appetite to create theatre in a socially aware and engaged way.”

Real theatre, not educational theatre

They might also look up Ned Glasier, artistic director of Islington Community Theatre, which provides out-of-school theatre training for 200 young people aged nine to 21.

“Theatre helps us explore what it means to be human” he says. “Doing this with young people, who are just starting to understand themselves as social, independent beings, has extraordinary potential. But you need experienced artists to help young people develop and stretch their skills. That’s why I work with professional writers. And that’s why I call what we do real theatre, not educational theatre.”

So, yes, this is a plea for art for art’s sake, even – especially – in schools. At a time when our government seems hell-bent on engineering a generation of engineers, it has never felt more necessary.

Adam Barnard is co-director of Company of Angels – follow it on Twitter @angelscompany and Adam @adamoflondon

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We don"t need no theatre in education: let"s get kids commissioning our plays