Children’s Theatre Festival returns for 11th year

Regular readers will know that one of my particular passions is family theatre and for that reason, when I took over as artistic director at Greenwich Theatre, one of the first initiatives I launched was the Greenwich Children’s Theatre Festival, a fortnight of family shows for all ages programmed across the Easter holidays. The theatre’s pantomime, now regarded as one of the best traditional (celebrity free) pantomimes in the country, had just started to establish itself but for me theatres should have a year round relationship with families and the festival was just one element in a new strategy designed to make that happen.

We open this year’s festival on 31 March with The Snow Beast, the new show from Scratchworks Theatre featuring live science experiments and an original musical score. Other highlights are set to include ThisEgg’s acclaimed Me & My Bee about the growing risk of extinction among the bee population, and Ingo’s War by Ditto Theatre, about a dog which finds itself stranded when its owner is evacuated during the Blitz.

I caught up with Sophie Hatton, artistic director of Ditto Theatre, about how the show was developed.

“The initial life of the show actually started off in a very different form to the show that it is today. Being a female-led company we were interested in exploring women’s roles throughout history and in particular wanted to focus on this during World War Two. We read lots of case stories, including a field nurse in France and an American undercover journalist, two characters featured in the show today. We then stumbled across a children’s story that looked at war from the angle of a teddy bear and fell in love with its simplicity and innocence, so we began to explore whether our story could be told through the eyes of a dog.”

Some of the very best shows go through this kind of evolution. Another show that has grown since it was first conceived is Taking Flight’s You’ve Got Dragons – a gently humorous and reassuring story about how children can cope with having nightmares. Artistic director Elise Davison took the show on tour in Wales in 2017 but now with funding from Arts Council England and others it has grown and is setting off on tour again. “This has become our most inclusive show to date” she said. “It now boasts inclusive British sign language performed by two deaf actors, live music, live audio description and animated creative captions. From humble beginnings on power point, the captions are now played on two huge TV screens housed in the set.”

The aim of the festival is to give families with children of any age the opportunity to share the experience of going to the theatre, from productions like There Was An Old Woman Who Swallowed A Fly for ages 2+, to Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant for 3-7 year olds, to The Snow Beast for over 7s. We even have the improvised comedy musical Notflix for older teenagers. I hope, in our own small way, we are contributing to a life-long relationship between theatre and our younger audiences, so that they will still be coming to see live shows long into the future.

James Haddrell is the artistic and executive director of Greenwich Theatre