It is all getting a little tense at Filskit HQ. There have been late nights, hysterical ideas and the obligatory panic purchasing of projectors. At the point of writing it is only one week until we pack the set into the car, bundle ourselves in, and set off at 5am to travel to the Take Off Festival. Hosted by Hullaballoo Theatre Company, the Take Off Festival is one of the major festivals of children’s theatre. We’re excited to not only be seeing a host of brilliant shows for young people, but also presenting a scratch performance of The Feather Catcher.

We’ll be putting our newest baby on show to over 100 children’s theatre programmers, arts directors, devisors, writers and makers. As if that wasn’t nerve-wracking enough, the other person on the scratch bill is the rather well known and brilliant Chris Goode. As you can probably imagine, we are both deliriously excited and utterly terrified. It feels like our dream job interview, X Factor audition and driving test all rolled into one.

In our experience, scratch events can be a great way for an emerging company to dip a toe into the theatre world. What makes scratch events so exciting and accessible, especially for new companies, is the element of risk involved. Programmers of scratch events are fully aware of this risk -  the company may be unknown and the work not yet made, meaning quality control isn’t really an option. As an emerging company, though, someone taking a risk on your work can change everything.

When we began, we relied greatly on scratch events as an opportunity to put our work, our ideas and ourselves out into the world. Without a constant director, airing our work-in-progress gave us clear pointers on where to go with it. The problem that faces us now is that scratch events focused on theatre for young audiences are few and far between. Other scratch events can still be valuable, but in order for your work to develop into a high quality piece ready for your venues, you need the feedback from a relevant audience. This is why Take Off is different and why it is so important that we get it right.

So in the world of the scratch event, what – if anything – is right and what is wrong? It is true that all experience can be useful, even if it does result in comments like “Maybe that wasn’t funny”, or “Let’s never EVER do that again!” (both true stories). But how do you make the most of a scratch event? The most important thing is to be as prepared as possible. Much as this sounds like common sense, it’s easy to end up rushing for a scratch event, especially if it involves travelling to a far-flung corner of the UK. In preparing, it’s useful to think about why you’re attending the event. Do you want to promote your work? Well, show off your most polished sections. Are you trying out a new idea or concept? Then show the relevant bits, and go armed with questions to make sure the feedback you get is as useful as possible.

Whatever you hope to gain from sharing your work at such an early stage, be prepared to listen to what its audience have to say. This doesn’t mean following every piece of advice (otherwise we would be naked and punching through boxes for our latest work!). Rather, think about how the thoughts and responses of others can point to ways of improving, simplifying and expanding your work. This way, it’s allowed to develop from being your precious child to a fully fledged show ready to take on the world.

We will let you know how we get on at Take Off – if we make it to Durham OK!

Filskit Theatre

Filskit Theatre are an all-female ensemble with a passion for micro-projection. The company, Sarah Gee, Katy Costigan and Victoria Dyson, have been making work together since 2008. As graduates of the European Theatre Arts course at Rose Bruford they were brought together by their shared love of projection and cake.

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A date in a wine bar, a job interview, a group of colleagues taking a break with a magazine; put your fingers in your ears during Chris Goode & Company’s Monkey Bars and you’d think it was a play about thirty to forty-somethings negotiating the ups and downs of professional life. Designer Naomi Dawson’s versatile set consists of luminous cubes, which are stacked and restacked by the cast to create the minimalist office/bar/ conference room that forms the landscape of adulthood. In fact, Goode’s script is a verbatim piece that draws on interviews with children under the age of 11. Dialogue Artist Karl James set up a tape-recorder and elicited kids’ responses to topics from faith to fame, “divorcedness”, and that eternal question, “What is your favourite sweetie?”, which are transposed into grown-up situations by a cast dressed for the boardroom. The effect is an endearing, funny and absurd series of scenes reminiscent of Creature Comforts.

Verbatim theatre seems to be ubiquitous at the moment, though usually in a political, and almost always serious, context (for me it’s forever associated with an awful student production about trafficked prostitutes). The technique is used in a refreshingly light way here; the central idea of Monkey Bars is that when children speak, we all have our fingers in our ears – take a listen to what they say. The untamed, frequently bizarre dialogues contrast brilliantly with recognisable adult set-ups, such as two people boasting about how late their parents let them stay up during half term – over a glass of wine. The tone of Goode’s direction is spot-on, and the skill of the actors is in inflecting a mature delivery of childishly constructed lines.

Not that it’s all fun and games; the premise would quickly wear thin if every scene were played for laughs. Domestic violence, war and preoccupations with the future all feature in the exchanges. Just as James doesn’t patronise his subjects with the questions he asks, often challenging them and encouraging debate, the actors’ delivery does not ridicule the material, but rather acknowledges and plays with it. The excerpts are well chosen, merging the trivial with the profound – apart from the final line of the play, which is predictable and seems a little too formulaic for the rest of the show.

The piece succeeds in bridging a huge generation gap, shedding light on the confused adult world and the surprising wisdom of children. It has a lot of heart, some of which perhaps rubbed off on me; when a group of schoolkids (admittedly older than the interviewees) laughed during one of the darker moments of the show, for the first time I wasn’t tempted to turn around and glare at them.

Monkey Bars played at Warwick Arts Centre and is currently on a national tour. For more shows at Warwick Arts Centre see their website.

Billy Barrett

Billy currently study English and Theatre at Warwick University. Between reviewing and reading for his course Billy writes, directs, and acts in theatre. He tries to see everything in London, Warwick and beyond!

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When celebrated theatre maker and bewitching storyteller Chris Goode presents a new show, audiences can be sure to encounter something extraordinary. From …Sisters (2008), his improvised take on Chekhov’s Three Sisters, to the charmingly bizarre Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley (2009, 2011) featuring a superhero born from the pages of a medieval illustration, Goode’s work routinely lands at some distance from the commonplace.

However, in his new play Monkey Bars at Edinburgh’s Traverse theatre, Goode takes as a starting point the most ostensibly ordinary and everyday of material: the words of schoolchildren. But by placing these, verbatim, into the mouths of adult actors, Goode creates something characteristically unique, inviting spectators to listen to the thoughts and opinions of children as if they actually issued from these more mature bodies. In this way, Goode raises the question of the extent to which we as adults really listen to, understand and relate to children.

“I wondered whether we would listen differently to the words if they were delivered by a body with more gravity, more substantiality: an adult,” Goode explains. It’s a remarkably simple but ingenious concept, which seems to have taken Goode more by surprise then by planned device: “It was an idea that came to me fully formed, so in a way it’s hard to know where it came from. I’m often thinking about who gets heard in our culture, and I was thinking a lot about the place of children in our society – about the situation that we put children in, so that it’s hard for us to tune into what they’re saying.”

The difficulties that adults encounter in truly hearing children are straightforward but difficult to overcome, Goode explains. “There are many obstacles: children are physically small, and they have little voices. Also, the ones you want to listen to most are often the smallest and cutest – which is not at all what we expect from the adults that we want to listen to.”

These are also the problems that Goode and collaborator Karl James needed to overcome in collecting the conversations with children. Goode described how he and James (whose work has included directing The Dialogue Project) went into schools to interview the children, all aged between eight and ten years old. “We conducted the conversations in a quiet corner of the classroom or the secretary’s office. We’d first thought of creating a ‘den’ that they could enter in order to speak to us – but a lighter approach seemed more sensible. We created a space that felt removed from the everyday reality of schools, but not disconnected – so that the children could concentrate on hearing each other properly.”

Most conversations were conducted between Karl James and one or two children, but sometimes two children spoke to each other directly. Working from this collected material to mould a script was, Goode says, very much a labour for inside the rehearsal room, rather than outside. Over six or seven days, the actors read through the entire 350-page transcript, taken from 11 hours on tape. Goode, who transcribed every word himself, did not play the original tapes to the actors, but let them discover the text for themselves. “Everything that was said we heard, but the actors didn’t hear the recording. We were looking for things that jumped out because they were powerful, moving, funny, or good stories – things that kids needed to be able to say. Anything interesting we kept.”  These ‘interesting things’ varied dramatically from “candid and true facts about home lives and school lives” to “huge lies”, but a great deal of sifting through the pages was also necessary. “There’s a lot of surrealism with kids – they talk a lot of nonsense and gibberish: talking and talking and talking. I was interested in the idea of finding stuff inside of what they were saying.”

After “gradual refinement” with the actors to distil the text, Goode took the scripts and notes away to create the final edit. The result was around thirty independent short scenes. Assembling the different conversations and stories meant “taking two or three different approaches,” Goode explained. In some cases it was a matter of translating the text into an adult framework: “There was a child who loves to write stories as a hobby, so we turned her into a high-profile author at a literary festival”. For others, updating the context of the scene was enough to create the adult scenario necessary to offset the child’s words. “For some of the conversations, going to a fictional place made it easier to achieve this clarity. Job interviews, wine bars: recognisable situations, which allowed the scenes to exist in an adult space. But other conversations are less specifically context-based, and we are simply watching adults on stage, or sometimes characters are talking directly to the audience.’

So is what we are seeing effectively an adult version (or someone that could be an adult version) of the same child? “Absolutely, yes. We didn’t want to make fun of anyone; we take all of the children seriously. We just wanted to make what they were saying more audible and clear.”

However, what Goode hopes audience members will gain from watching the play goes beyond learning to be better at listening to what children are saying. “It’s not just about hearing children, but also about recognising that growing up is about developing tools and disguises. What happens when an adult is speaking in a childish voice? We all have that inside us still. There is a sense of bewilderment in the adult world, of confusion. Ultimately in the play, the words you hear strike you as belonging not to children or adults but to people.”

This effect upon an audience is key to Goode’s working approach, and (with memories of being captivated by The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley at last year’s Fringe) I ask him whether this relates to his skill and passion as a storyteller. “I’m certainly aware of wanting to engage with an audience in a way that a storyteller would,” he answers. “Sometimes that’s in a very oblique way – in a quite fragmentary way, like Monkey Bars. The play is like a series of snapshots, but it is telling you a story – an argument – underneath all that. It’s a journey it’s trying to take you on. I tend to think about things in quite a musical way: in a lot of the language I use, I am thinking about composition, trying to shape the experience of an audience.”

In fact it was within a school setting that Goode began to be aware of working in this way. “A drama teacher said to me, ‘work towards the feeling.’ I always have a feeling about the relationship I want the piece to have with its audience. That when it starts.”

It is perhaps this significant but abstract objective – the intended experience of the audience – rather than a focus on a particular size of project or type of production, which has led Goode to create such a varied body of work. But another factor, Goode suggests, is his tendency continuously to crave the complete reverse of the work in hand: “I’m someone who really wants to be working on the opposite of what I’m doing all the time – rebounding from big to small, small to big, one kind of work – such as storytelling – to another form. It’s like dodgems – or a pin-ball ride. For me, that’s interesting.” For fans of Goode’s work, meanwhile, it’s a promise that even as Monkey Bars embarks upon its debut run, another play every part as original and intriguing might be beginning to form at its pole.

Monkey Bars is playing at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh until the 26 August, presented by the Chris Goode company and the Unicorn Theatre. For tickets and more information, visit www.edfringe.com and www.traverse.co.uk.

Image credit: Monkey Bars by Chris Goode

Sarah Williams

Sarah has an MA in theatre from RADA and King's College London and has written for publications including A Younger Theatre and The Guardian.

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“What is wrong with our generation? I mean, what is up with it?” a man asks, wearily. “I know, I know,” the man to his left agrees. “I mean the clothes these girls wear,” the first man continues, “they’re just inappropriate.” “Totally inappropriate,” agrees the second, “the other day, there was a girl in our year wearing a skirt like this short, walking down the street. And this older guy – like he was in sixth form – looked at her like she was an object, and the girl actually liked that!” “It’s terrible,” chimes in the first man.

In Chris Goode’s humorous, eye-opening and frequently moving new play, the words of eight to ten year-old children are placed into the mouths of adult actors, in adult situations, inviting reflection from an adult audience. What is most striking is the degree to which very ‘mature’ concerns, fears and pleasures are voiced by such young people, via these grownup mouthpieces. This is as true of an animated discussion of the monarchy staged between argumentative workmates in a bar as it is of a moving monologue in which a boy (that is, man) describes his obsession with watching footage of the unrest in the Middle East because, as a Muslim, he feels that these are his people. The ‘adultness’ of the children’s thoughts and the sincerity of their outrage, fear or concern about significant issues is repeatedly arresting.

However, that is not to say that the quirks of certain childish traits are not also enjoyably preserved with the play. From the casual over-accuracy of a child asked how many spectators watched him as a mascot at Twickenham stadium (“About… 61,000”), to the delightfully Machiavellian bragging of a child who has perfected the art of crocodile tears to great effect at home. These childlike peculiarities also feed hilariously into the adult contexts in which Goode has resituated many of the conversations, such as a job interview in which the candidate is asked haughtily “What is your favourite sweet and why?” as well as what she would do in a variety of imaginative related scenarios: “If you were a bubble gum creature, what would you do?”

The play is structured as a series of short scenes, some including the whole cast (three female and three male actors) and some involving just one performer at a time. Rather than concealing the ‘material-gathering method’ behind the script, this is exposed right from the beginning, with Karl (James, who worked with Goode on the project), appearing as a character on stage to explain to the children the purpose and modus operandi of the audio-recording. He is also seen intermittently throughout played alternately by different actors, posing thoughtful questions to the children. The actors also make obvious visual reference to the play’s central premise by entering dressed in the neutral, slightly vulnerable apparel of pants and vest, and dressing themselves onstage into that most fiercely ‘grown-up’ of costumes: corporate attire. What’s more, small touches of physicality or delivery of lines by the actors seem to hint at their younger selves, but (in their subtlety) also highlight the fact that such infantile traces are always, already, seen in adults. At the play’s start, a young man slumps dreamily forward, looking intently at a plate of green jelly before him. He strums a guitar softly and tunelessly, singing “Jelly Man, shake for me, shake for me.” There is a tangible aura of ‘small boy’ about him – but is he simply behaving as an adult genuinely might? From start to finish, Monkey Bars succeeds in provoking us to question our reactions to the scenes and characters before us, and consequently to children in the wider world.

But the play also serves frequently as a reminder of the degree to which children are both aware of our behaviour and impressionable to it. Curious expressions (“There is no difference between tramps and bankers”) paint a humorous, slightly confused image of scoffing parents while other flashes of dialogue poignantly reveal home lives that are troublesome but accepted (one character makes light of arming his mother with an umbrella as his father was beating her).

Never mocking or heavy-handed in their approach, a strong, talented ensemble are up to the challenge of transmitting the tone and meaning of each child’s words, while simultaneously projecting it authentically into the adult contexts of the play. Goode’s success as a writer and director is to allow the text to speak through the clean lines of the production, overdoing nothing. Notwithstanding a premise which could so easily become contrived, far-fetched or distracting, the sense of simplicity and honesty maintained throughout the play is testimony to Goode’s sleight of hand as a writer and proficiency as a director.

Monkey Bars is playing at the Traverse Theatre until 26 August. For more information and tickets, see the Traverse Theatre website.

Sarah Williams

Sarah has an MA in theatre from RADA and King's College London and has written for publications including A Younger Theatre and The Guardian.

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