Last week I had the great good fortune to be in the audience of the new musical Ghost in London’s West End.  What a great evening’s entertainment with all the elements that make musical theatre great in place – great performances, engaging storyline, terrific music and wonderful design.

While a lot will no doubt be said about the special effects in the show – and they are amazing!- what I most enjoyed about them was that they were used to augment the storyline and used with a lightness of touch that didn’t distract from the emotional journey that audience was being taken on.  Too often in recent years we have seen spectacle on stage make a poor effort at compensating for a storyline that makes no sense or characters that ultimately we don’t believe in or care about.  Shows often are about the effects rather than the content and every time I hear a multi million dollar price tag mentioned in a show’s marketing my alarm bells go off.

It seems producers think that audiences are incapable of using their imaginations effectively and so they create illusions all the time in an effort to drag people through the door and pay their 65 quid.  It is quite marvellous what designers and technicians can achieve for an audience but if you leave the theatre not feeling engaged by the characters or the story then flying chandeliers, helicopters, drawbridges and jolly green giants can’t compensate.  While the effects in Ghost are perhaps the most astounding in terms of creating an illusion ever seen on the stage they never get in the way of the story itself.

I am put in mind at such times of the experience we offer our audiences in schools.

We also create remarkable landscapes and magical effects but we do it not using lights, hydraulics and the latest technology.  We do so using that other most powerful means of creating a fantastical world – the imagination.

West End in Schools shows use that most effective theatrical convention where pictures and places are painted by words in much the same way that Shakespeare did for his audiences.  Without the benefit of the technology theatres have at their disposal now he could create a thunderstorm on a heath, a battlefield or a forest full of magic simply by suggesting them and allowing the actors to be the eyes through which the audience saw their surroundings.

This is the convention that I use in creating the shows that tour for West End in Schools.  By engaging the imaginations of the children the theatrical event becomes a lived experience, one that they participate in actively rather than being passive observers of a spectacle.

In our upcoming production Jump To It I have seen streams appear then drunk dry, mighty mountains disappear and dark and scary forests  traversed.  In its own way, the experience is every bit as magical as the marvellous illusions created in the musical Ghost but happily it is something that can be made available to children in their own school environment and be afforded by everyone.  And it is something that once seen the students are empowered to create themselves.

• Tags:
• process
• professional theatre

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