I spent a great evening watching nine plays written by ten and eleven year old kids from North London.
It's an event organised by a charity called "Scene and Heard" (
http://www.sceneandheard.org/). They get professional writers and actors and directors to help children to learn about writing which culminates with them writing their own ten minute play which is then performed by adult actors.
I've been involved in the writing and acting stages of this before and it is a really great idea.
Best of all though, although the adult writers can help the child by asking questions about what might happen next, the plays are entirely the child's work and have to be performed verbatim by the actors.
It is amazing how unfettered the imagination of children is, especially before they become too self-conscious or affected by peer pressure. Some of the plays I have seen on these evenings have been amongst the funniest and most moving pieces of theatre!
Tonight there were plays that had characters including a small universe, a dustbin and an Italian cookery magazine.
I think my favourite one was about a badger who met someone who was pretending to be a human but turned out to be imagination (thus a metaphysical concept coming to life). Imagination was bored with human beings not using her effectively and wanted to see what went on in an animal's brain to see if she could be of any more use there. Brilliantly, the badger's brain was played by a different actor. Although the piece was funny, it genuinely made you think about some very complicated concepts - certainly much cleverer than anything you'll see in Harry Potter.
What is also very impressive is the standard of the acting. It would be very easy to perform these plays all tongue in cheek and send up the use of language and the strange characters, but everyone played it very straight (much funnier anyway) and helped make the characters real.
No-one learns at drama school how to deliver a line like "My ultimate dream is to marry a man's Y-Fronts" but the actress in that particular play managed to do so and to make you believe that she did (she was of course a pair of posh lady's pants, so it was an acceptable dream).
Thank God that most people become too self-conscious to express themselves in an imaginative way once puberty hits or I could find myself with rather more competition in my chosen field.
