1. How and why did Patch Theatre choose an assemblage of Pamela Allen stories to adapt for the stage?
Why? My passion for Pamela’s books began when my own children fell in love with her story Who Sank the Boat? That was 20 years ago! Back then, it was a nightly ritual to “perform” it. I still adore her books.
Pamela’s stories are elegant. They appear simple but they resonate with depth and meaning. They are also beautifully aligned to real childhood experience. Children connect immediately to the stories because Pamela has a wonderful understanding of the universal dilemmas of childhood and she couches those dilemmas in all sorts of engaging contexts. Most importantly, her stories are quirky, funny and entertaining.
Pamela both writes and illustrates her own books, so they have a recognisable signature and style. She’s written way over 30 books and children love the familiarity of her illustrative and literary style and her characters. Characters like Mr McGee appear in a number of her books.
Meg Sorensen’s Australian Book Review describes Pamela’s books as having “to capture the attention, engage the imagination, teach, show, tickle and excite small children”
It’s the “glow, gesture din and dance” of Pamela’s stories that make them so very theatrical. Pamela herself says that it’s because they’re designed for reading aloud.
There’s a vaudeville-esque feel to them. The characters are quirky, the words are musical, the stories are dramatically well-structured and they are full of action and humour.
How did I choose what stories to adapt?
I started with the story of Mr McGee and the Biting Flea because I know how much children adore its cheekiness. Then, I simply selected 6 more stories from my list of favourite Pamela Allen books intuitively responding to their potential for theatre performance. That took me a month or so!
2. Who did the adaptation?
All our creative processes at Patch are collaborative. I undertook the first process, which was to shift the texts of Pamela’s stories into song structures, because I was keen for the show to be almost totally sung. What was fascinating was that the inherent rhythms in the language suggested musical styles for a lot of the stories. For example, Belinda, a story about a farmer and a cow, fell almost instantly into a bush dance style, which gave us a great lead into how the story might be told.
After completing this exercise, I worked with designer Dean Hills to find a conceptual basis for the storytelling. We settled on the idea of a props warehouse of cases, trunks, junk and found objects. It’s a place where 3 characters come to work each day to find a list of Pamela’s stories on a chalk-board. Their job is to either prepare or perform the stories on the list. On some days, there’s an audience in the house and on those days they perform the stories on the list to those in attendance.
With this conceptual framework in place, we collected an assortment of cases, trunks and other paraphernalia, which we thought the performers might find useful to render the stories and invited a cast of three fabulous, actor/singer/musician/theatre-makers to play. They improvised around the song and image ideas we provided and responded to tasks set to test and extend the beginnings of what Dean and I had prepared. We used Brian Wilson’s (of Beach Boys fame) whimsical songs from Pet Sounds and Smiley Smile to inspire us.
Slowly, through play and improvisation, the style of each story began to take shape within the context of the conceptual framework we’d established.
Brown, Bread and Honey, a story about a King, who becomes terribly overweight, was told by his 3 cooks using pastry cut-out characters that they create as they tell the story. We played with and prodded and tickled these stories in every which way until we found a theatrical version for each of them.
It was my job as director/auteur to draw these outcomes into some sort of cohesive whole.
What many folk don’t realise is how long it takes to make a new theatre work.
Our shows are lovingly crafted over a 24-month period, involving 3 to 4 creative development weeks separated by periods of research, incubation and refinement.
This first two thirds of our process tends to be open-ended, explorative and whimsical.
Lot’s of thinking, pondering, playing, research by me at first, which then leads to intensive “on the floor”, experimentation, improvisation, task solving and playing by actors, designers and composers. This play-time is very similar to the way children play.
The fruits of the creative development process move progressively to a more logical and analytical phase as we enter the rehearsal period of three intensive weeks, followed by a short premiere season.
This performance outcome undergoes a rigorous peer-assessed, critical appraisal process involving artists, teachers and presenters. The findings of the critical appraisal panel form the basis upon which the work is refined prior to further seasons. As the work earns its place in the Patch Theatre repertoire, it becomes more and more refined as it is exposed to audiences and further rehearsal/development processes.
Each repertoire work is continually under development and is ever evolving toward our goal of elegant simplicity.
Simplicity is a hard won achievement and reveals itself only after every imagined option has been tested, evaluated, discarded or embraced. Jim Sharman
3. Was Pamela Allen involved?
Pamela acknowledges that creating a picture book is one kind of creative process and making theatre is another. She entrusted us with her beautiful books as source material for our theatre production. She came to the premiere season of the work and we sought her approval of the outcome, which she gave generously. When you’re working with some-else’s creation you’re living and breathing it day by day … so while she wasn’t personally involved in our rendering of her stories … of course, it feels as if she is very present in our process every day.
Pamela understands the creative process and its mysteries and is open to where these might take us. We are at the moment developing a new project inspired by her wonderfully whimsical story – A Lion in the Night. To give you an appreciation of the level of trust and respect she affords our creative process – she has allowed us the opportunity to develop a new poetic, visual theatre narrative that springs from and resonates with her story but doesn’t re-tell it. We’re terribly excited by this idea… one picture book story giving birth to a different visual theatre experience – a sibling, in effect … that shares an exploration of themes and ideas and some of the content and character of the book.
4. Does the adaptation follow the McGee books’ narratives, or have you shifted away from these — and if so, why?
Yes, in our Mr McGee and the Biting Flea production we follow the narrative fairly precisely, whilst giving the expression of it, a new form. Same content; new form. (Very different from our next endeavour.)
However, Patch vigorously avoids replicating the experience of the book on-stage. Our challenge has always been to provide a new experience of the stories – to provide a fresh perspective that will extend the experience of the story for children when they come to the theatre.
Hence, the 3 warehouse attendants play out the stories in a whole range of ways, inspired by the way children play. One story is told using play-dough figures. Another uses ladders, cases, rubber duckies and buckets of water. Yet another uses a balloon as its central character. And, of course, every child and parent who has enjoyed the naughtiness of Mr McGee stripping off all his clothes and jumping into the sea to get rid of that annoying flea – are hanging out to see how we manage that on stage!
The show is fast, funny and highly theatrical but avoids all the cliché’s of children theatre. We believe that children’s theatre should be amongst the best theatre there is. We create our productions over long periods of time with the best artists we can muster and consult constantly with early childhood experts and children themselves. We aspire to make theatre that is genuinely inventive, challenging and entertaining – theatre that doesn’t talk down to children or dumb down the material. We respect children’s intelligence and honour the notion that they are artists themselves – in the main, more open to creativity and imaginative play than most adults.
5. Pamela Allen’s illustrations are very recognisable. Did you try to recreate these on stage? If so, how? If not, why not?
No – not in any way. We have an entirely different colour palette defined by our design premise. The reason is the same as that given above. The last thing we want to do is simply replicate the experience of the book. I have seen children’s productions that do this and I think it’s a pointless, artless exercise. We don’t need to give children what they already know. That’s the basis of commercialism. So we get Disney in books, on ice, on tv, as toys, on CD’s/DVD’s, games … etc.
I love what Noni Hazelhurst has to say about all this.
The commercial imperative has replaced the creative spirit. We now have a generation of kids who believe that unless it’s for sale it’s not worth having. Noni Hazlehurst
My hope is that in a culture pre-occupied with the material world, the theatre we make offers a powerful connection to the inner lives of children. We seek to provide a place where children can share transforming experiences that sustain them with the joys and insights that connect with those qualities that make us human.
We hope that Patch Theatre’s work is an antidote to the clutter, banality and allure of commercial culture.
Children can be encouraged to grow, develop and participate in the world if we expose them to beauty, truth and the power of their imagination. Noni Hazelhurst
Back to the question. I think there needs to be a gap between what children know and what the experience of the show provides. An audience’s imagination is then engaged in doing the work of filling the spaces. Theatre is a wonderful vehicle for imaginative engagement because it requires a suspension of disbelief and an active imagination to provide mental images of what’s not there physically.
6. Further to question 5, what about her backgrounds — lots of white space. Did you go with that?
No – although I love that aesthetic and will be utilizing it in a new work called The Moon’s a Balloon inspired by a poem by ee cummings … but that’s another story.
However, if you think of “white space” as the “imaginative space” we create in our performances –well then, I hope there’s plenty of that.
7. How was the play received?
The show has performed to well over 120,000 children. It won a national Helpmann Award for the Best Presentation for Children and the Adelaide Critic’s Award for Innovation. It has played sellout seasons at the Sydney Opera House and the Arts Centre, Melbourne. It has had 3 sellout seasons in Adelaide. It has toured all over Australia and has also performed to 20,000 children in the largest children’s theatre in North America (the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis)
Everywhere it plays, it generates rapturous responses.
8. What’s coming up next (in terms of adaptations)? And why?
Next is A Lion in the Night … a very different approach to the notion of adaptation … if in fact it is an adaptation at all! Maybe we should call it a “sibling production”.
Mr McGee and the Biting Flea is scheduled for another national tour in 2014.
