Playing to the child within

‘There is only good theatre and bad theatre, it doesn’t matter whether the target audience is children or not,’ says actor Louis Lovett, the new resident Theatre Maker at The Ark

CHILDREN’S theatre is a serious business in Ireland these days, and since Ireland’s first dedicated children’s cultural centre opened in 1995, the Ark has been leading the way. Companies such as TEAM Theatre and Graffiti create theatre experiences with an expressly educational remit. Various regional youth theatres that sprang up across the country since the mid-1970s fostered youth participation in the theatre. The annual pantomime season, which now extends from November to February, provides ample commercial children’s entertainment. There are now several dedicated theatre festivals for children in Ireland (Galway’s Barboró and Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown’s Flip Flop among others), while the Dublin Theatre Festival has absorbed visiting international children’s shows into their programming strand.

But the Ark is unique in having its own purpose-built premises, with a miniature theatre for children, which has become one the most fertile space for professional children's theatre in the country. Furthermore, the Ark's recent announcement of its first Theatre Maker residency proves its commitment to nurturing what is still a nascent strand in professional Irish theatre. The Theatre Maker in Residence project will include a teacher-training strand, an actor-training programme, several community outreach projects, and a production of a new play by Finegan Kruckemeyer (whose name alone promises a tremendous amount of storybook fun). Each of these projects will be led by actor Louis Lovett, who was appointed to the post just before Christmas, and who takes the leading role in The Girl Who Forgot to Sing Badly, directed by Rough Magic's Lynne Parker, which premieres tomorrow at the Ark.

Lovett is a familiar face on the Irish stage and screen, his exuberant cherubic glow endearing audiences to characters as diverse as John Betjeman in Improbable Frequency, Willie Hayes in Dublin By Lamplight, and the lederhosened Deiter Langer in Pat Shortt's TV sitcom Killinaskully. He is also well known to Ark audiences, having performed more than 500 times on the Ark's intimate stage since the theatre opened 14 years ago.

SITTING IN THE comfortable green room in the bowels of the Ark’s impressive building, Lovett is in sombre, contemplative mode: children’s theatre is not just child’s play, as he explains, and he is eager to affirm his own commitment to strengthening the tradition of children’s theatre in Ireland, and to passing along his own experience to other aspiring artists.

Lovett refuses to make the distinction between his work in children’s theatre and “that other, grown-up business”. Having found himself working with the Ark very early in his career, he never felt the need to separate the two.

“I actually learnt much of my craft from performing in front of children,” he says. “In fact it is the distinct energy that [an audience of children] bring to a show, and the relationship you need to establish with them, that I have used to inform the other stuff,” as he calls his adult-oriented work. “In the Ark,” he continues, “the audience is on three sides of you and in close proximity, and you have to play to all sides, to every audience member. They can see you and you can see them, so you have to give yourself to them, you have to be very connected. That is something that really worked for me as an actor and I’ve tried to bring it into all my work; to make that concrete relationship with every audience I’m playing for, no matter what age they are.”

On one level, Lovett says, an audience of children is “a more living audience. An adult audience have trained themselves in how to watch theatre,” but children will “give themselves entirely to the show if it’s working. And that demands a particular kind of performance from you. You need to know how to ‘surf’ their energy; to know when to give it back to them and when to take it and run with it; when to let them interact and when to knock that on the head and move on. But you can’t ignore them. And a lot of the time you need to set your boundaries before the show even begins.” In the actor-training course he is devising as part of his remit as Theatre Maker in Residence, Lovett hopes to help performers that are less-experienced with young audiences to develop strategies for filtering that energy. In demonstration, he mimes throwing the energy back and forth across the room; still in the abstract (there are no children around), it looks something like rugby.

Lovett learned the mechanics of this "friendly wrestle" on the job, with his first Ark show in 1997. In the music-driven play, The Croons, directed by Martin Drury and devised by Nico Brown, he played Baby Croon, a creature who hadn't yet found his voice. "They really knew what they were doing and gave me a brilliant grounding in performing for children," he says. He has spent the 12 years since developing his skills and started his own company, Theatre Lovett, in 2007, with the express purpose of "helping to develop genuine interest in the sector".

Lovett has also spent considerable time researching the northern European approach to theatre for young audiences, where children’s theatre is an enormous industry as well as a crucial part of the social fabric of childhood development. He cites the Norwegian model of the “cultural rucksack”, a government sponsored initiative that provides five annual cultural experiences to every child, one of which must be theatre. He also talks about the passion for children’s theatre in the education sector in Denmark, where an enormous children’s theatre showcase attracts teachers keen to book shows for the coming school year. But it is not an educational remit that inspires the welcome embrace, Lovett explains: “It is a recognition of the importance of experiencing the world in fiction, where the safety of a piece of drama sets a boundary where children can explore different possible outcomes of situations in their lives.”

A similar commitment at governmental level in Ireland is still some way off, but Lovett is optimistic that the increased interest from the creative and critical sectors will help to ensure future commitment from the education sector. "It is really heartening to see the finest of Irish actors, writers and directors working in children's theatre," he says. "Marina Carr and Roddy Doyle writing; Lynne Parker, Selina Cartmell and Jo Mangan directing; and actors such as Don Wycherly, Lisa Lambe, Catherine Walker bringing their professional skills. And the recent nomination for the Irish TimesTheatre Awards [last year's production of The Giant Blue Handby Marina Carr, was nominated for Best Production] . . . that all has to contribute to the profile of children's theatre in Ireland."

The most valuable lesson Lovett has learnt over the last 14 years – one which is reinforced each time he participates in the creation of new work or takes a seat as an audience member himself – “is that there is only good theatre and bad theatre, it doesn’t matter whether the [target] audience is children or not.”

The Girl Who Forgot to Sing Badly, by Finnegan Kruckemeyer, is at the Ark until March 7th. More information on the Ark's Theatre Maker in Residence programme at: ark.ie