Writer Mike Kenny talks to Terry Grimley about his plans for theatre aimed at younger audiences.
Award-winning writer Mike Kenny is a man on a mission to break the mould of British children's theatre.
It's a field in which adaptations of best-selling books have come to dominate to such an extent that the scarcity of original writing seems to be taken for granted. And what new plays do get produced tend to be on a small scale.
So Kenny is collaborating with Birmingham Rep to produce a series of three completely original pieces of work for young audiences with substantial casts. The first of them, Kenny's own Whiter than Snow , opens at The Door, in Birmingham, on Friday.
But, as Kenny explains, the assignment has proved unexpectedly tough.
"The project is intended to do something about the fact that there aren't enough large-scale original pieces of theatre for children, but I think it's a sign of the problem that it's actually proved more difficult than I anticipated to find writers.
"It will happen – it's just proving slower than I expected. I thought we would be wading through piles of great ideas waiting for their time to happen, but actually what I think has happened is that people have gone elsewhere, taking their energy and imagination into other areas, going into TV because they believe they are not going to get their work produced in the theatre."
Having one of his own plays produced was part of the deal from the outset.
"I felt hungry to work in a bigger arena. Of the 16-odd plays I've written I would say ten or 15 of them are two-handers. I thought I would end up a miniaturist if I didn't have a chance to stretch my muscles.
"I started out to write a play with nine actors but in the end I decided to do it with a cast of six. So I scaled it down myself in the end, but for artistic rather than financial reasons."
Whiter Than Snow is a play for 7-13 year-olds which is being co-produced by the Rep and Graeae Theatre Company, the company which specialises in combining disabled and non-disabled actors. It is a reworking of the Snow White story from the point of view of what in less politically-correct times were known as dwarfs or, as current terminology would have it, persons of restricted growth, played by what Graeae terms "short actors."
"I've worked with Graeae quite a lot since Jenny Sealey has been artistic director, and with Jenny before that," Kenny explains.
"The first play I did with her was when she was an actor for Red Ladder, a Leeds-based company, nearly 20 years ago. In some ways it started the journey we're on now because that was one of the first pieces that found ways of integrating signing with the action, rather than having a signer standing at the side.
"Since then we've gone in other directions so that this play incorporates audio-description into the body of the piece as well, so that both a deaf and blind audience will get a theatrical experience. It won't be quite the same experience, but they don't have to plug themselves into an external voice."
The play features the Frantz family, a troupe of diminutive performers based on the story of an actual showbusiness family from Austria who were sent to Auschwitz but survived because they were made the subject of genetic experiments by the notorious Josef Mengele. The youngest member of the family died only a few years ago.
"Oddly, I had started the story before I came across them. It started off as a play about science and I was particularly interested in the area of medicine relating to 'designer babies' and the possibility of manipulating genes to filter out particular disabilities or to make this perfect child that would live for ever.
"In doing that I folded into the mix an interest in fairy stories, and I took the Snow White story for two reasons – it starts with the longing of the Queen for a perfect child with ebony hair, white skin and ruby lips, and it has the family of dwarfs that becomes the refuge for Snow White.
"So I had a company performing Snow White, and I found there had been a family of seven siblings, all short, who had ended up being the subject of very dodgy genetic experiments carried out on behalf of Dr Josef Mengele.
"I have set it in a similar place to where Brecht and Beckett set their plays, which is not this world but has recognisable elements of it. It's set somewhere between the past and the future, which I suppose is the present. But it has both the past and the future in it."
Whiter than Snow is at The Door, Birmingham Repertory Theatre from Friday until February 24 (Box office: 0121 236 4455). It then tours to Edinburgh, Plymouth, London and Newcastle.
