Theatre Column
Theatre's pied piper
After 15 years in the
North-East, theatre boss
Paul Harman is talking
about retirement. Viv
Hardwick meets him
ONE of the UK's favourite musicals,
Blood Brothers, actually
owes its early life to the persuasive
powers of retiring CTC
(Cleveland Theatre Company) boss, the
North-East children's theatre creator, Paul
Harman.
As founder of the Merseyside Young
People's Theatre Company he commissioned
Willy Russell, who had an office
next door at Liverpool's Everyman Theatre,
to write a play for secondary schoolchildren.
"It only had an opening song and We
Went Dancing and like a fool I let him get
away with a contract which did not specify
half a per cent in perpetuity because I
could have funded every children's theatre
company in the country with that.
"He did give me £800 from the first musical
production at the Liverpool Playhouse
and you realise that this is the kind
of thing that happens to you once in a lifetime,"
he says.
Fifteen years after taking charge of the
once struggling Cleveland Theatre Company,
the man who, by design, is the Pied
Piper of theatre, has chosen World Children's
Theatre Day on March 20 to step
down at the age of 67.
"Two or three years ago I began to think
it was time to move on. Back in 1994 the
then Northern Arts (the precursor to Arts
Council England North East) agreed to
throw me a bone of £25,000 a year to run
away and play. I was 54 then and they said
here's some money, go away and make
some plays and we don't want to hear
from you again for a while'. At that point
the company was effectively mine, but
over the years I've come to realise that
what the young people and teachers
need in this area is continuity of an institution
that belongs to them," he
explains.
CTC Theatre, based
at Darlington Arts
Centre, is now an
internationally
recognised specialist
company
which makes plays
for children and young
people. Board members
are drawn from the ranks of
teachers and head teachers.
"In those 15 years we've
probably done 45 different
shows. In the last five years
we've taken those plays not
only to 250 schools a year but
nine other countries including
Korea, Japan and Europe,"
explains Harman, who
moved the company from Teesside to Darlington
in 1998.
He's spent 45 years working with
schools, mostly in the North, having
gained a burning desire to act at school in
Brentwood, Essex, and Birmingham University.
But his move to the North-East
was out of necessity because his wife,
Sarah, was offered a job in Darlington.
"My work in Liverpool was running
down after 20 years. It was wonderful to
be released from a decaying and dying part
of town and come to leafy Darlington with
its access to the most beautiful country in
the universe," he says.
LOOKING back on his tenure at CTC,
Harman comments: "We're always
trying to push the boundaries and
we're publicly funded and received the
best part of £1m over this period. It's when
it stacks up like that you get very frightened.
You think How have we spent it?',
but it works out at about £3 per head for
every young person who has seen one of
our plays which is not bad when you think
it costs the taxpayer every time you buy a
ticket to see the Royal Shakespeare Company
for example. I think the taxpayer is
giving you at least 15 quid every time you
sit down. The opera house is more.
"That money has allowed us to experiment
and bring in fantastic plays from
other countries and the kind of work that,
if adults saw it, would be hailed as revolutionary
and exciting. For us it's normal."
CTC attends gatherings and festivals all
over the world and discovers the other
ways that children's theatre is used.
"The thing that I think I'm most proud
of is that I've stayed in one place for 15
years and there are half-a-dozen actors,
some from this region, who have come that
same journey with me and been in a dozen
plays. That means we've grown our
skills together and shared ideas down
the years and learnt things that we've
turned into plays to interested our audience."
The most recent project is called Five, a
dance piece for five-year-olds, which features
senses and every child of the right
age from the area came by bus to see a performance.
"It's going on a national tour in the early
autumn and booked for Korea
next year. So I'm very proud of
that," he says.
He's hoping to remain part of
CTC's policy of presenting constantly
innovative and appropriate plays
for children from all over the world, using
both local and international talent, by becoming
one of ten associate artists.
"That's why we're going to have a creative
producer as a lynchpin in future and
that person will facilitate the projects
which the artistic associates and others
will come up with," Harman explains.
As a man who no children of his own he
says that it's professional skill which allows
a man nearing 70 to know how to fire
the imagination of youngsters. "It's like
being a juggler. When we go and perform
in a school we cannot stereotype that audience
and say Ah, they are all middleclass
or working-class. We know from experience
that they all respond differently.
We have to craft the kind of theatre that
can be received through all the senses.
"This is where contemporary education
is falling down, despite millions and millions
spent, results are not improving as
much as you'd expect," he says of our
word-obsessed culture.
"People have forgotten there are other
ways of feeling the world. I love text myself,
but what I have to recognise is that
most people will not remember a single
word when they walk out of a theatre.
They will remember a certain smile on an
actor's face, or a particular sound or gesture
that will stick in the brain for 20
years."
12:24pm Monday 17th March 2008
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