Steve Pratt talks to playwright Mike Kenny about his many successes with children’s theatre

WRITER Mike Kenny still remembers a review of the first children’s play that he wrote. The critic called it “sub-Grimm” and clearly it wasn’t meant as a compliment. “I thought, I’ve just made 80 five-yearolds sit quietly for an hour,” says the York-based writer in his defence.

These days that critic (no longer with us) would be eating his words.

Kenny has established himself as a leading writer of young people’s theatre with a place in the Independent On Sunday’s list of top ten living UK playwrights and plays – 100-plus, he reckons – performed all over the world.

His adaptation of The Railway Children for York Theatre Royal premiered at the National Railway Museum in York before transferring to a theatre in the old Eurostar terminal at Waterloo Station. This summer his version of the Mystery Plays was performed in the same city’s Museum Gardens.

A retelling of Sleeping Beauty is one of the Christmas shows at West Yorkshire Playhouse, but before that he’s reunited with tutti frutti, a Leeds-based touring company celebrating 21 years of creating work for children aged three and above and their families.

The play is Rapunzel, the fairy story about the girl with very long hair imprisoned in a tower. It’s been on his list of stories-to-do for some time. “I absolutely love working with fairy tales, they’re fantastic – like a children’s version of Greek myths.

They’re quite huge and also very flexible,” he explains.

RAPUNZEL isn’t not one of the most tackled fairy stories, although Disney did its version as Tangled not so long ago. “I didn’t watch that in the end because I thought it better not to sully my palate with the Disney version. People said it was very good. I’m not anti-Disney, funnily enough. Occasionally their aesthetic and their perkiness slightly gets on my wick.”

His Rapunzel is “totally off the wall really”, he says. There are certain limitations, such as cast size – just three performers – but says that’s enough. “I’ve played a bit fast and loose with it. It’s recognisable as the story but it’s not evil witch, brave prince and all of that.

“It pretty much all takes place within the tower over the years that Rapunzel is growing up. It’s really about her relationship with her grandmother and nan. We never really explain why her parents left, but in my head it’s one of those situations, particulary common in Caribbean families although it happens in other families, where the parents go away to work and the grandparents bring up the children.

“What begins as a desire to keep the child safe becomes building a tower around her. At first Rapunzel is fine, then they come into conflict because obviously she needs to escape.”

Tutti frutti’s version doesn’t necessarily follow the expected story.

“Her hair starts as a nice thing, she combs the hair and plaits it, and it keeps on growing. She plays with it, uses it to paint with and skip with, but gradually it becomes an absolute weight and she uses it as her rebellion.”

People associate two things with the story – the high tower and the hair – and neither is possible to do realistically on stage. “So you have to find a poetical, theatrical way to express that. We’re doing it in all sorts of ways. It’s a beautiful design by Catherine Chapman and the music will be great. In fact, all the elements of it are fantastic.”

HE’S worked with tutti frutti before and has known artistic director Wendy Harris, who directs Rapunzel, for a long time as she was an associate at Sheffield Crucible Theatre on the first play he wrote for young children, The Lost Child, back in 1989.

Before that he worked for ten years with the Theatre In Education company at the old Leeds Playhouse.

“Children’s work was what I did for a long time,” says Kenny. “After that, for a couple of years I just worked as an actor and people started approaching me, first to devise and then to write for children.

“It seems extraordinary now because times have changed so much.

Theatre In Education doesn’t really exist any more in the form I used to do it. I rarely get commissioned to do school shows any more. I miss the kids and that relationship with them.

“In Theatre In Education days it was generally thought there wasn’t a lot of point in doing theatre for kids under seven. I don’t know why we accepted that as a truism, but we did.

Then as school timetables got tighter and tighter, many of us drifted down the age range and found this wonderful world where you could do almost anything and the audience was fantastic. It was possible to contact them in all sort of ways.”

After The Lost Child, he kept being asked to write for children. Now he also writes for family audiences and for disabled and learning difficulties companies. The Mysteries was a massive undertaking and he had “quite a few wobbles” in the early days because the city is “full of experts and so many rather grand people who’ve worked on it in the past”, he says.

“Someone in the very early stages of doing it said to me, ‘you usually work with children, don’t you?, this will be a bit of a stretch.’.” Hardly a confidence booster.

He found his way into the play cycle the day he thought, “okay, I’m going to rethink this as a play. I’m going to take all these disparate things and voices and make a consistent story, following the character of God on a journey through it.

“I calmed down a bit and was able to do it. Being asked to adapt the plays was like standing outside the minster and being told you’ve got to rebuild it.”

So did he get any complaints?

“They didn’t reach me. Beforehand it was ‘oh no, modern dress and all of that’. There’s a group of people who think it should be on wagons and think it’s misconceived.

“That was another problem. I believe in theatre as a here and now art.

I don’t want it to be heritage, that sort of museum approach of let’s dust it off and imagine what it was like to be medieval.”

  • Rapunzel: York Theatre Royal Studio until Oct 13. Box Office: 01904-623568 and yorktheatreroyal.co.uk
  • Tours to Richmond Georgian Theatre Royal, Nov 10. Box Office 01748-825252 and georgiantheatreroyal.co.uk