How to put on a show for kids: Encourage the imagination, avoid audience participation and never dumb down

We’re all formed by the art and stories we grew up with. Based in Co Galway, Branar have been putting on shows for children in Ireland and around the world for more than 20 years. If you’d like to know how to put on a show for children, the company’s artistic director, Marc Mac Lochlainn, takes us behind the scenes to see how it’s done.

It’s all about primary colours and perky voices, right?

Absolutely not. The primary colours thing is more about mass marketing, and while they can initially attract attention more quickly, they don’t hold it so long. They’re also not great for reflection and thinking. And those perky voices? Kids can spot insincerity a mile off. “Never talk down to them,” Mac Lochlainn says.

I can do that. Or, rather, I can not do that ... Do I need special training?

Not necessarily. Mac Lochlainn came to it via teaching, at both primary and secondary level. Working with TY students led him first to drama and then to creating drama workshops to help kids with Irish-language poetry. “It evolved from there,” he says modestly of his award-winning work.

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What about minding my language?

Not that sort ... Some of Branar’s work is multilingual and some has no words at all. Mac Lochlainn went to international festivals to see how storytelling works when you don’t understand the words. “I’m interested in ways to keep children engaged. They don’t really worry about language. They just want to know what’s happening now. In a show for adults it’s often about the writer, or the director’s ‘vision’, but in a show for kids it’s all about them.”

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They’re all sitting in silence. Does that mean they’re bored?

Definitely not. Kids demonstrate boredom in many ways, including what Mac Lochlainn describes as the bum shuffle. “Silence means they’re in,” he says. You can learn a lot about working with kids from body language. If he notices them looking over their shoulders, he realises the actors are talking over their heads, focusing on the adults at the back of the room. Branar workshop their plays, step by step, with the local school.

What if you do start to lose them?

Attention spans differ, and Branar’s work is about encouraging the imagination rather than ramming a curriculum down young necks. They work with ages from babies to 12-year-olds. The younger you go, the shorter the moments have to be. Avoid audience participation (“it can cause panic, and you lose focus”), build in layers, including music, “so children can find their own way in to the story”, and never dumb down. Mac Lochlainn also says that “there has to be a gift every now and then”.

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Like bribes and sweets?

A “gift” is a magic reveal, a piece of comedy, or a surprise. “And we move the attention span around the stage, so they’re not looking at one spot all the time.” This is a world away from kids’ entertainment made for screens, where it’s about grabbing attention and keeping it with a constant bombardment of colour and sound, rather than a series of invitations to wonder. “It might be their first time having 40 minutes in their own imaginations, and not having things flashed at them,” says Mac Lochlainn, adding that each child will probably have something entirely different going on in their heads throughout.

Sounds wonderful

It is. “We’re saying we’re doing everything we can to create an atmosphere, and if you come along with us, we’ll make it as magical as we can. We can’t wait for the day,” he says, “when a work for children is as unquestionably valued as a work for adults.” Bring it on.

Branar’s Rothar is at the Ark, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, from Wednesday, September 27th, to Sunday, October 1st. It then tours during October