Theatre's just child's play

Though a novice in children's theatre, Lynne Parker's work with Rough Magic, combining serious work with a wicked sense of fun, made her the perfect director for ' The Girl Who Forgot to Sing Badly,' writes PETER CRAWLEY

THE COMEDIAN David O’Doherty once admitted that his most crippling heckle came not from a rowdy comedy club but the audience of a children’s book reading. A young boy raised his hand during his performance and flatly enquired, “Does this get good soon?” Unflinching honesty, voluntary participation and questioning – endless questioning – are the qualities usually associated with young audiences.

Louis Lovett, a staggeringly talented performer with a career that includes 16 years in children's theatre, knows it can be daunting. "People who dip their toe in this area can get their toe burnt," he says. But when Lovett needed a director for Finegan Kruckemeyer's sublime play The Girl Who Forgot To Sing Badly– co-produced by Theatre Lovett and The Ark in 2010 and now revived at The Peacock – he asked Lynne Parker, a novice in children's theatre, to take her first plunge.

In her Rough Magic office, a modest, bright room in the company’s bustling building, Parker seems characteristically unfazed as she recalls anticipating the needs of a child audience. “I don’t know what this says about me,” she says, “but I didn’t find it difficult at all. I could revert very easily to the age that I thought was necessary. I don’t think that, fundamentally, you ever change. You still have the same needs about what you believe when you’re 90 as you do when you’re nine.”

When, early in the run, a young heckler called out, “He’s only a muppet!” at a character represented with a finger puppet, Parker even agreed. “We lost the puppet immediately, and suddenly we had a mouse. Whatever way Louis looks, that’s where the mouse is . . . Easy!”

But Parker recognises the logic behind child's play. In some respects, that makes her the ideal person for the job. Her diverse work with Rough Magic, the company she co-founded in 1984, has always balanced serious enquiry with a wicked sense of fun. The story of The Girl Who Forgot To Sing Badlyis straightforward enough: Peggy O'Hegarty, daughter of a family of professional packers (they pack things – professionally), discovers one day that her parents have disappeared, along with the rest of her city, and she sets out to rescue them.

But the Irish-born, Australian playwright Kruckemeyer plays fast and loose with time, place, physics and even the narrative, while Lovett, the story’s eternally bemused and freewheeling narrator, keeps starting, stopping and injecting commentary. “Someone we care about will die . . .” he tells us very early on. “But there will be a goat!” Parker’s job here, as she describes it, is essentially the paradox of theatre making: to allow the thrill of anarchy while ensuring a guiding discipline.

Take Paul O’Mahony’s ingenious set; a huge crate that is somewhere between a magic box and a toy chest, spilling containers, contraptions and surprises. “These are artisan people, they are workers,” Parker says of the packing family. “That was part of the aesthetic: everything had to come out of a crate and had to be put neatly away at the end of the story. Once you’ve got your rule, then you can get a bit of mischief. Anything can come out of the crate. A grand piano can suddenly emerge from a jam jar, with a sound effect, when you take the lid off.” You can colour outside the lines all you want, but first you need to have the lines.

Parker doesn’t discriminate in her approach; she has always treated adult audiences with as much respect and divilment. She takes the work of her uncle, the great Stewart Parker, as an example. “There’s the same ludic sense in Stewart’s plays as there is in Finegan Kruckemeyer’s actually. The same collision of elements, the use of music and pictures and sound, and the momentum created by the theatre space.”

In fact, that could define the Rough Magic aesthetic, where Hilary Fannin and Ellen Cranitch's Phaedralast year, 2006's The Taming of the Shrewor Arthur Riordan's 2004 musical Improbable Frequencyall found room for spurring seriousness and refreshing frivolity, often simultaneously.

“What Lynne brings to the party is a great calmness, whereas I tend to fidget in my seat,” Lovett says. “Lynne really trusts her actors. She lets you play. And I love to play.”

FOR SOME, THE GIRL WHO Forgot To Sing Badlywill be their first experience of theatre, but Parker hadn't thought of it as a way of building future audiences.

“Developing your audience and developing your craft are two slightly different things, even if they’re part of the same area. But I suppose it is part of the more holistic approach to theatre-making. And yes, you have a responsibility to your audience no matter who they are or what age they are. You want them to come back – simple as that.”

Rough Magic, however, has become conspicuously engaged in replenishing the theatre with new generations. Even its next production, Neil Simon's comedy Plaza Suite, sounds like a transfusion of talent, the triptych directed by three Rough Magic alumni – Sophie Motley, Aoife Spillane-Hinks and Matt Torney – young directors working on the stories of middle-aged couples looking at, as Parker puts it, "the awful spectre of old-age".

All three are graduates of Rough Magic’s Seeds programme, which for 10 years has mentored playwrights, directors, designers and producers, delivering plays and launching careers.

Then there is Rough Magic Hub, a resource sharing initiative for emerging companies that now populate their building, and Advance, a platform for the further development of established theatre artists. Given that Rough Magic emerged, all but unsupported during another crippling recession, is it no longer possible for new artists to establish themselves without assistance?

“I think it’s becoming more and more difficult,” says Parker. As an established independent theatre company, Rough Magic can extend its production support, mentorship and space. “But it’s also allowing people to feel that there’s a friendly environment. When we started in the 1980s, there was a big division between established companies and the chaos that was independent theatre.” (Although Druid’s Garry Hynes, she says, had been a source of early encouragement.)

“We have no truck with that . . . No theatre company or arts organisation can survive in a sector which is poor in itself. It’s important that, not just out of altruism but self-interest, you make sure the sector is healthy.”

The same applies to children’s theatre, stimulating new audiences, nourishing imaginations and provoking thoughts. Peggy O’Hegarty’s story is, at root, about growing up, becoming resourceful when other supports disappear.

“It’s bigger than just the arts industry,” Parker says of this theatrical continuity. “It’s about the mental health of the nation. We’ve got to fight for art, not as a leisure activity but as part of the education and mental wellbeing of our population, particularly in this rather grim time. What is art for? Well, it’s for making people’s lives better, surely.”

In the meantime, though, there is still the small matter of technical rehearsals in The Peacock as the well-travelled The Girl Who Forgot To Sing Badlyadjusts to a new stage. Lovett, who thrives in front of an audience, continues to play around with the show for the benefit of Parker and the techies. "Louis is just a born performer," says Parker. "A terrible show-off is another way of putting it." She laughs, admiring his antics as they spiral out of her careful construction. Will you people ever grow up, I ask? "I hope not," she says. "That's why I do this job."

The Girl Who Forgot to Sing Badlyis at The Peacock, Dublin until April 30th

Forever young Creating theatre for children

Theatre fights its corner if it's good. The same principles apply to seven- or 47-year-olds, Parker thinks. "Like anything else, it has to be really good to work. There has to be an element of surprise in theatre, and live interaction – when it's real – is almost the only way of doing that. You've got this tremendous electricity and the audience feel like they've got a stake in it."

Look for compatibility and contrasts. "This is a great marriage between Finegan and Louis," says Parker. "Finnegan is a very free spirit. He has a wonderful imagination and a playful sense of language that never talks down to the kids. Louis is incredibly fastidious: you've got this very free imagination and then this detailed technician, a real craftsman. They're slightly yin and yang, but they come from the same planet."

Love your audience, but don't try to be their best friend. "It doesn't work," says Lovett of performers who don't preserve a distance. "You're giving away your power. You're the person who's bringing them on a journey; you can't be just the same as them.

Don't flatter yourself. "I try to debunk this myth," says Lovett, "that children will tell you if they don't like it. Children can be just as polite as adults. How else do you explain the amount of sub-par work for children?"