Shakespeare Schools Drama Festival
Various venues until October 12
The best ideas arrive in the strangest places. Ten years ago, Chris Grace, director of animation at S4C (the Welsh fourth television channel), was responsible for a series of films from Shakespeare’s plays. Made at studios in Russia, using a variety of animation techniques, the Animated Shakespeare series proved a tremendous success and has been used in 90 per cent of British schools; it is the BBC’s most successful education series.
Then, on millennium night, Grace was on holiday in Sarawak, Borneo, when a thought from “somewhere at the back of my head” suddenly gelled. One or two schools had asked if they could use the scripts of the Shakespeare films for drama productions. Why not bring several schools together and get them to perform for a wider audience?
Once he has a good idea, Grace is not the sort of person to sit on it. Back from the jungle, he contacted Gerson Davies, director of education in his home county of Pembrokeshire, and by early October 2000, 12 to 15-year-olds at eight local schools were putting on the Animated Tales to packed houses. “There were some extraordinary performances,” Grace says.
This month, the Shakespeare Schools Drama Festival comes to three venues in London: Greenwich Theatre, Stratford Circus and Questor’s Theatre, Ealing. Children from 63 inner-London schools are involved in productions of a dozen plays. On Sunday, November 25 - long after the festival has finished - four schools will perform at a special gala evening in the Duke of York’s Theatre, although Chris Grace emphasises that this will be a celebration, not a competition.
The festival retains strong links with the original films. It is being administered by Right Angle, the team that co-ordinates S4C’s animation projects. The 12 plays (all to be performed at each of the venues) are the same as those in the two series of films. They include The Tempest, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello and Macbeth . The scripts are those written by the late Leon Garfield for Animated Shakespeare. Garfield reduced the action of each play to about half an hour and cut out some minor characters and sub-plots, but retained as much as possible of the original language.
The Shakespeare Schools Drama Festival is at Greenwich Theatre tonight and October 8-12 (tickets: 020 8858 7755); final performances tonight at Stratford Circus (020 8279 1000) and Questor’s Theatre (020 8567 5184), with the Thomas Tallis Twelfth Night on October 12
- Picture: a Quinton Kynaston pupil rehearses Romeo and Juliet
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