A
Fabulous Beast
Penny Francis is impressed by the reborn Unicorn Theatre
Here’s
an example of serendipity: you scour London for a suitable building
– or site – to house a new home for a famous children’s
theatre, and you finally alight on a suitable space. Then you discover
that the lane alongside the site bears the same name as your theatre.
The Unicorn Theatre fronts Unicorn Passage. The passage lies between
Tooley Street, outside London Bridge station, and the river Thames,
hard by the South Bank arts centres: the nearest are the Globe and
Tate Modern.
The style of the spanking new building is not exactly Polka or the
Little Angel and at the moment the exterior, the office spaces and
the foyer are modern and hard-edged. The foyer is to be softened
with installation art (a Japanese designer is preparing wonderful
creatures made with withies); and the two playing spaces, one a
rectangular studio (80 or so seats) and one an adaptable horseshoe
(320 seats), are warm and inviting.
 Why
would funders and backers, private and statutory, put millions into
a brand new building to house theatre for children? Unicorn’s
artistic director Tony Graham marvelled at the changed attitudes
to young people’s theatre that have made this investment possible.
Some readers will no doubt remember how, in recent years, there
have been many national and international conferences and festivals
about children’s and young people’s theatre where speaker
after speaker pleaded the cause. Things were almost as bad, in terms
of subvention and status and infrastructure and knowledgeable criticism,
as for puppet theatre! And if puppetry has come out of its ghetto
and has allied itself to theatre at large, theatre for the young
has grown stronger and more interesting in every way, attracting
artists – designers, writers, musicians, performers, directors
– of ever higher quality.
Those international conferences and festivals have brought results,
and helped to put pressure on the potential funders and supporters
to change attitudes dramatically (as it were). It should be acknowledged
that in this case the Arts Council came up trumps. They took a policy
decision to reward new work for the young that really was new. They
looked for challenging writing, an understanding of aesthetics,
enlarging perspectives to embrace and explore the world –
these were some of their criteria to help raise the game.
Tony Graham was one of those who had no problems with those demands.
Challenges, aesthetics, wide perspectives, a lively enthusiasm for
new ideas and forms are all evident after speaking with him for
just a few minutes.
His ideas of what makes exciting theatre for the young can now take
shape in the new building. Unicorn has a long history, and although,
after years of touring, the company did indeed come to rest for
thirty-five years (1967 to 2003) in the Arts Theatre near Leicester
Square, it was always a temporary measure. The dream of a permanent
home did not go away. The company, founded by the pioneer Caryl
Jenner in 1947, had by the ‘60s a national reputation, brilliantly
developed when Nicholas Barter became director after Caryl Jenner’s
death, and since 1997 with Tony Graham at the helm.
Graham is a highly experienced theatre director on a steep learning
curve. He’ll be on it, I swear, as long as he lives. He’s
that sort of man. To talk to him is to catch a fever of enthusiasm,
visions, discoveries and total dedication to his theatre and its
future. His taste in theatre is nothing if not catholic: he loves
(and wants more of) puppetry and object theatre, dance and music
theatre, opera, text-led and image-led work, popular work such as
adaptations of well-known books, and experimental chamber pieces.
He is fascinated by the possibilities of ‘found sound’
and soundscapes, devised theatre, storyboards, the delicate substitution
of images for words, although he is a man of words and wants children
to appreciate and grow to love them through theatre. Practitioners
he admires and has collaborated with include Steve Tiplady, McDermott
and Crouch of Improbable, Simon McBurney of Complicite, theatre-rites’
Sue Buckmaster and Sophia Clist, Oily Cart, Annie Wood, and writers
Michael Morpurgo, Philip Pullman and Carl Miller (who is also the
theatre’s associate director), Brian Way, Charles Way and
others – I admire his taste since I am myself a fan of all
of them and since the list includes so many who ‘do’
puppets.
The
theatre opened to fanfares last November (2005), and the programme
already reveals the mix of productions that promise to ‘exercise
the issue of children’s theatre’. There has been David
Wood’s Tom’s Midnight Garden, Carl Miller’s Journey
to the River Sea; a collaboration with the marvellous Teatro Briciole;
a musical, Yikes!, and now a zany Treasure Island from Scotland
(Wee Stories). The immediate future holds an African musical (from
an African company, Vuluvulani); a light installation by Oily Cart
for young people with complex disabilities or autistic spectrum
disorder; a new adaptation of Cyrano and a home-grown production
of Oz. Various events and activities enrich the mix. Graham thinks
in terms of 60% house-created productions, around 30% visiting companies
and roughly 15% international work (to spice the almost-global debate
on what makes good theatre for children).
 He
has massive challenges before him. Naturally the hardest are the
financial ones: the building still needs additions and refinements;
it has to become a destination of choice for the family and for
school outings without relying on the obvious attractions of a sugary
diet of well-known pop stories adapted from books, films and TV.
If teachers and parents lead their charges here they will find surprise
and excitement – two essentials of theatre – for themselves
as much as for the kids. It may need some time and a steady hand
on the tiller, not to mention the continuing encouragement and support
of Southwark Council, the Arts Council and private sponsors, to
get the vessel stabilised.
I saw an extraordinary piece in the studio theatre (labelled The
Weston); the show was called Play Antarctica. With the simplest
of material resources, it conjured up a world of ice and snow, of
silence, ice cracking, winds buffeting, animals crying. Its genesis
came from a solitary sound designer called Craig Vear, who sent
himself to Antarctica to record its unpeopled sounds. In the show
he played various instruments and strange ‘things’ on
a platform overlooking two performers, one of whom was puppeteer
Sean Myatt and the other actor Tim Kane, known to some readers from
his work on the Little Angel’s Mouse Queen. The use of objects
and materials was inventive and surprising and the children were
gripped. It was Tony Graham’s first close encounter of the
object theatre kind: he directed it and was happy to discover more
of the potential of image and object play and the inventiveness
of the three players. I saw the show and enjoyed its originality
and unexpected power over a rapt young audience even with all its
silences and subtleties and without a strong narrative to drive
it.
That was one of Graham’s many pointers along the way to the
new Unicorn and its future trajectory. He says: ‘I want to
blow children’s minds – and my own – with a rich
palette of forms’. He is in pursuit of the future, of a modern
flavour for children’s theatre.
The Unicorn is sixty years old, and starting on a new story, a story
of the next sixty years, let us fervently hope. The word ‘exciting’
is over-used in theatre, but it applies here. If you will go to
London Bridge station, pass the London Dungeon and look upwards
at the buildings on the other side of Tooley Street, you’ll
find it in a trice. The Unicorn in Unicorn Passage. Go and experience
a spine-tingling vision of young people’s theatre.
For further information
on the Unicorn Theatre and for full details of the summer performance
and education/activities programme, see www.unicorntheatre.com
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