Shakespeare 4 Kidz in “The Tempest”

Many of Gibraltar’s school children are in for a treat this week! The Gibraltar Spring Festival is again catering for the youngsters and on this occasion has brought out to the Rock Shakespeare 4 Kidz – a group which perform Shakespeare in a fun and innovative way presenting musical adaptations and bringing the Bard’s work to life for kids.

“Shakespeare 4 Kidz creates a way for children to enjoy Shakespeare before the age they would usually encounter him,” explained Julian Chenery, Chief Executive Director of the group.

The group is presenting The Tempest at the John Mackintosh Hall twice a day for the schools.

The whole project began 12 years ago as a schools project.

“I was looking for a follow up for something I was doing with my writer Matt Gimblett who, in fact, was born in Gibraltar.

He persuaded the school that I wanted to do an evening of Shakespeare. I was inspired by the animated tales and thought that I’d do a brief version of a comedy, a tragedy and a history and link it all together and make a really good evening. We started work on the first one which was A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

The project proved to be a huge success. Other schools wanted to perform the show and were asking for the scripts and so what they did originally was to create a pack for other schools who wanted to do a similar project.

“We were approaching publishers but not getting many good offers so we decided to go it alone and create a script pack: how to put the show on, music, and CDs. I went to see Oliver! at the Palladium and we wondered what would happen if we had a professional theatre company putting on the show we had written. So, at our small local theatre we had a six week run of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet and we sold 5,000 tickets.”

It was after this that the project began to grow and undertook a UK tour. They also embarked on an education programme – “schoolteachers were very frightened of Shakespeare especially at junior and primary level so we carried on refining our packages. We did this for many reasons mainly to get people younger than ever before interested in Shakespeare primarily by performing.”

The workshops which complemented the ongoing work teachers were doing in the classrooms came next. The original concept was to put it in a format so that it could be performed by junior school children.

“We created a musical theatre format that they could perform. We wanted to do for Shakespeare what Oliver! did for Dickens. This is still a very successful format and a lot of people enjoy it. We hit on something that was successful – we were communicating the story and really engaging the children – this was something different, something people had not seen before – these were musical adaptations of Shakespeare,” he said.

But he emphasises it was all put together as an educational package “of course to ensure this you have to deal with the language. No matter how clever they are, you cannot put Shakespeare across to children who are only eight or nine years old. So we created this hybrid of easy-to-understand dialogue but with some of the famous speeches intact. We also have some songs which are an important part of Shakespeare’s original work.

“Hopefully we’ve created a blend where you move seamlessly from one part to another – you won’t realise this is Shakespeare and when it’s not. What we always want to preserve is the essence; it’s a completely authentic telling of the story and we preserve the form of the original as a stepping stone to the original text. There is the quality and work of genius of a multi-layered piece like Hamlet which is a far more mature work than when he first started. Shakespeare is alive today because for the first time I suspect here was a writer holding a mirror up to society and writing about ourselves. He’s writing about our inner emotions and writing about kings and queens as if they were us, ordinary people. He was, in his way, the soap opera writer of his time. Here was a man who was writing for a popular audience,” says Julian Chenery.

He adds, “at the time people probably didn’t think he was going to be more popular than some of the other writers. The storylines he wrote then are as relevant in the 21^st century as they were then – love, jealousy, hate, murder – all the things we hold so near and dear to our heart. He was the man who, for the first time, made that happen. I tell my colleagues at The Globe and the Royal Shakespeare Company that we would not have the West End and Broadway culture we do have if it weren’t for William Shakespeare.”

He believes it is because of his legacy that theatre in the UK is at the top of this pyramid now.

“He is the heartbeat for everything we stand for in theatre – he was the grandfather of theatre. The creative industries are what they are because of this snowball that was started.”

The Tempest is a beautiful musical adaptation of this magical play.

“I think it is our most complete show, for me it’s the best thing we’ve written. The songs are very good and we have Jason Lee Scott who is fantastic as Prospero. It is going to be the first of our movies which will be shot next year, as opposed to the stage-to-screen DVDs we’ve done”

Whilst in Gibraltar Shakespeare 4 Kidz will perform eight shows. The set and equipment was transported to Gibraltar and the cast is aged 19-46.