This afternoon, the 20th June we held our Annual General Meeting at the House of Lords. At the close of the meeting, Vicky Ireland MBE announced that our Chair, David Wood OBE will be stepping down after nearly twenty years of outstanding service. We are so grateful to David for all his hard work representing ACA and are thrilled that he has accepted a new role as President of the charity.
Furthermore, we are pleased to announce that David will be the 2017 recipient of the JM Barrie Award! This award has previously honoured prestigious recipients such as Dame Jacqueline Wilson, Baroness Floella Benjamin OBE and Sir Quentin Blake CBE. It is our immense pleasure to present this award to David, whose tireless work in children’s arts has inspired and influenced so many across generations.
In conversation at Oxford’s Story Museum, the veteran writer and actor reveals how to win over the world’s toughest audience. Original source, Oxford Today.
Putting on a children’s play ‘is far more difficult than Shakespeare’. That’s the view of David Wood OBE — a man who has been called Britain’s national children’s dramatist — after 50 years creating many of the best-loved children’s plays. In conversation with journalist Libby Purves at the Oxford Story Museum, he said the vast majority of actors would find performing in front of a big audience of children far too frightening. Children are ‘volatile and very difficult. They have no theatre manners.’
But the fact that children don’t clap politely like adults when they’re unimpressed is exactly what drives him. ‘If you ask me why I do it, [the children] are the challenge,’ he said. ‘When you get it right, they’re the most rewarding of all. If they’re quiet, they’re listening, and then you’ve won — and that’s a huge triumph. I find adult audiences very boring.’ He summed it up, ‘My job is to stop children wanting to go to the loo.’
David Wood OBE in conversation with Libby Purves at the Story Museum. Image (c) Olivia Gordon
As an actor, Wood (Worcester, 1963) is best known for playing Johnny in the 1968 film If. But as a writer, his adaptations of classics — from The BFG and The Witches by Roald Dahl to Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce to The Tiger Who Came To Tea by Judith Kerr and Meg and Mog by Helen Nicoll — have enchanted generations of children, as have his screenplays, which include adaptations of Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome and Back Home by Michelle Magorian. He had written plays for adults, such as The Go-Between, based on L.P. Hartley’s novel. And he’s the author of many original children’s plays and books, most famous of which is The Gingerbread Man.
But keeping small bottoms on seats is hardly straightforward. Wood (right) has learned that if adults in rehearsals think part of the script is hilarious, children in the audience probably won’t. And children consider themselves part of the action, exploding through the fourth wall. In one performance of The Gingerbread Man, an actor foolishly paused for breath after delivering the phrase ‘something to make him freeze’ and children started shouting ‘ice’ and simply would not stop, leaving the cast on stage confounded. Wood considers it part of his job when writing plays to anticipate what the audience will say, and when, and their words are printed as part of his scripts.
Another pivotal realisation for Wood came after he heard of a conversation a mother had with her daughter when the child said she liked a book. The mother asked why, and the daughter replied: ‘Lots of suddenlys.’ ‘That, to me, was magic,’ said Wood. ‘It transformed what I was doing in play writing.’ He started writing with ‘suddenlys’ on every page — from a phone ringing to a change in lighting or music to a new character to a ‘new sting’ in plot.
Wood focuses solely on entertaining the children, not their parents. ‘I don’t think of the adults at all. Taking children to the theatre is a nightmare. The adults will enjoy it if the child enjoys it.’ And he has found a number of things children usually enjoy. Humour, of course; changes in scale from the miniature to the giant; and animals.
But also children are profoundly interested in ‘injustice’. Wood explained: ‘I believe we are all born with an innate sense of justice. The first thing a child learns to say is “It’s not fair”. That relates very much to storytelling — a child will root for an animal character who is mute and can’t defend itself, or Cinderella.’ Roald Dahl, he noted, was a genius in creating child protagonists who face a world with all odds stacked against them. Parents are, in several Dahl novels, killed at the start of the story, leaving the child to cope alone.
The Story Museum, Oxford. Image (c) Steve Daniels via Geograph, under Creative Commons licence
There can be an edge of tremendous sadness in children’s literature and Wood’s plays don’t shy away from showing, for instance, the horrors of war, in his staging of Goodnight Mr Tom by Michelle Magorian. In the film of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, the boy who has been turned into a mouse by evil witches is turned back into a boy again. But in the novel, and in Wood’s adaptation, the boy is left as a mouse. Films often seek to sanitise the sharp edges of children’s literature with happy endings, Wood noted, and commercial pressures currently threaten original children’s drama in Britain. ‘Everyone wants the big title,’ he said — big musicals or films of bestselling novels are what gets commissioned. But ‘a lot of the best work is small scale’.
‘Terrifyingly’, as Wood put it, Winnie-the-Pooh is now owned by Disney. When Wood was planning a show celebrating children’s literature for the Queen’s 80th birthday in 2006, he wanted to bring the three famous bears together — Pooh, Rupert and Paddington. The people who own the rights for Rupert and Paddington agreed, but, he recounted, Disney took months to consider and ultimately refused to allow Pooh to appear next to the other bears. They eventually specified that the show could go on if there was a fence built around Pooh; the other bears could wave at him from a distance. And that is what Wood had to work around.
David Wood’s theatre career was already flourishing during his time as an undergraduate at Oxford in the mid-1960s, reading English. Having loved performing puppet shows and magic acts as a child, he credits his admission to Oxford by Christopher Ricks to his prowess as a magician. ‘At the end of my three years I said to him: “Why me? I’m not the greatest student and I did more theatre than I’d ever have done at drama school,’ Wood told Oxford Today. ‘He said that it was my magic that got me in; I’d been so passionate about it at my interview; he had small children and thought I’d be useful to have around. I did his children’s parties.’
While ‘scraping through’ his degree at Oxford — as he puts it in his seminal book Theatre for Children — Wood acted, directed and wrote for about three shows a term. He was an active member of the Oxford University Dramatic Society and the Experimental Theatre Club, performing not only at venues like the Oxford Playhouse but the West End and the Edinburgh festival.
One particular show he saw as a student, at Oxford’s New Theatre, proved an epiphany. It was a big commercial pantomime of Peter Pan, a book Wood had adored since childhood. The star turn cracked an adult joke over the children’s heads and then said to the parents in the audience: ‘Oh, come on, let’s get the kids out of here and then we can get started!’ For a blushing and irritated Wood, ‘It was as though an electric shock had jolted me.’ He thought: ‘Surely those children deserved better. It struck me that there was very little theatre aimed at children.’ That moment was a turning point in Wood’s life — and he has carried his respect for children throughout his career.
Taking part in any of the arts means ‘making and doing’. This involves taking materials, ideas, thoughts and feelings from our experience and changing them. You can do this having apprenticed yourself for many years to the best practitioners of that art,
you can do it by studying that art, but there are also ways of taking part in some arts very simply and easily following what is already there, or someone who shows us how. This last way of working means that taking part in the arts is available to all. It mean that anyone in any situation can experience what it means to transform materials, ideas, thoughts and feelings and in so doing transform a part of themselves.
This is one of the ways in which we have discovered how to investigate the world around us and our place in it. A school curriculum always includes subjects which are concerned about the world but it’s not often easy for such subjects to include the child and that child’s place in it. Whether a child is doing pottery, performing a part in a play, taking photos or any art – these will involve the child finding a place for themselves in relation to that material, that view, those lines from a play or poem. Surrounding this activity there will be thought and conversation. These will nearly always involve this ‘positioning’ – “where am I in relation to this stuff?’
We make the plea that children should have time and space to do this as part of their emotional, social and intellectual development. Part of education must be about ‘where am I in this world?’
Doing such things may lead to professional careers, they may enable children to be more confident and willing learners, they may provide potential activities for people for the rest of their lives. All these are valuable outcomes. However, we would do well to remember that children are human beings and are not half-human beings waiting to be grown-ups. As human beings they are entitled to have time and space to reflect on this matter of who they are in the world.
We see a great danger in thinking of education purely and simply in terms of national or international test scores. Such scores can only tell us what kind of teaching most suits that kind of test. It doesn’t tell us about anything that is not tested or cannot be tested. Yet, questions of how can I affect this material (clay, or words, or the body, for example) are crucial to how we proceed in this world. It is not sufficiently useful to simply know the world or to be able to describe it. We have to know why we are changing the world – for the good or the bad? We have to be in a position in which we can come up with ideas for improving people’s lives. We have to know what enables us to face danger, cruelty and terror. We have to know what enables us to have good times too! The arts enable us to do these things and much more.
However, it cannot ever be that we think of the arts as being ranked in some kind of league table – that, say, poetry is ‘better’ than pottery, or some such. Nor can we think of the arts as being best practised by those who are better off, or some such. We say, ‘all arts for all’.
This year’s J M Barrie Award has been presented to the much-loved children’s author, Dame Jacqueline Wilson for a lifetime of unforgettable writing for children.
Jacqueline Wilson is one of the UK’s favourite children’s authors whose work is loved by her legion of loyal fans. Best known for characters such as Tracy Beaker and the Victorian foundling child, Hetty Feather, over 38 million copies of her books have been sold in the UK and they have been translated into 34 different languages. Jacqueline Wilson was Children’s Laureate from 2005-2007 when she spearheaded a campaign to encourage parents and carers to read aloud to children. She was awarded an OBE in 2002 for services to literacy in schools and then was awarded a DBE in 2008. She is currently Chancellor of Roehampton University where she is also visiting professor of Children’s Literature.
Nick Sharratt, Jacqueline Wilson’s long-standing illustrator gave a tribute to Jacqueline as part of the ceremony accompanied by the present and previous Children’s Laureates. Malorie Blackman OBE, Laureate from 2013-15 read the citation for the award and Hebe Russell, aged nine, along with Chris Riddell the current Children’sLaureate, presented Jacqueline with her award. Other icons of children’s literature present in the audience included Michelle Magorian, Lynne Reid Banks, Jamila Gavin and Jan Pienkowski.
The Outstanding Contribution Award went to Sir Ken Robinson, inspirational advocate of creativity in education. His talk, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” is the most viewed in the history of TED and has been seen by millions all over the world. Kenneth Olumuyiwa Tharp, Chief Executive of The Place, delivered a tribute to Sir Ken, who, although unable to be present, sent an inspiring video. His award was collected by his daughter, Kate Robinson.
ACA Member’s Awards went to Carolyn Mairi L. Forsyth, Producer at the Unicorn Theatre, Sahana Gero, creator of Heart Beat Music Academy and Daniel Jamieson, playwright for Theatre Alibi.
To celebrate the 50th Anniversary of TIE, Trustees Awards to internationally acclaimed playwrights Mike Kenny and Charles Way.
David Wood OBE, chair of ACA said “Children are the future. The arts practitioners who specialise in entertaining and inspiring them and triggering their imaginations deserve, Action for Children’s Arts believes, public recognition. This is the 11th year of the J M Barrie Awards. We are proud to honour Dame Jacqueline Wilson, Sir Ken Robinson and our Members’ Award winners, Carolyn Mairi L.Forsyth, Sahana Gero, Daniel Jamieson, Trustees’ Award winners Mike Kenny and Charles Way. They are all brightly-shining beacons in the vibrant world of children’s arts.”
