Brief Encounter With … Mike Kenny

Mike Kenny is one of the UK’s most prolific playwrights, known best for his work for children. 

Following the success of their production of Cinderella last year, Mike and director Gail McIntyre continue the ‘Big Stories for Little People’ series with Aladdin which opens at the West Yorkshire Playhouse on December 3rd. Joanne Hartley catches up with Mike to find out more.

Have you had a busy year?

I’ve had a very busy year. I’ve written an awful lot. I did Wind in the Willows for York Theatre Royal. I did a short play called The Scarecrow for a company called ‘ajtc’ which was just shortlisted for the Writer’s Guild Best Children’s Play Award. I’ve already done a short play for children for the Olympic year. I did Aladdin and I also did a play for a French company called The Forgetting which is a piece to be performed by children about a character who falls asleep at the age of ten and wakes up at the age of 82, having missed the latter half of 20th Century life and finding themselves in an old people’s home. They still think they are ten but they’re actually 82.
 
And this play is to be performed by children?

Yes, the youngest child in the piece gets to play the oldest person and the oldest actor who is actually 18 plays his great-grandson. So it ends with a scene where he’s talking to his great-grandson who is older than he is. This was the original conceit of the play.

That sounds quite abstract for children’s theatre.

They’re much more adventurous in France then they are here.

I wrote a blog for The Guardian this week about my feelings about English children’s theatre which is very much about adaptations and very much on the back of literature and this frustrates me. I go to France and it is much braver and bolder theatrically and more interesting as a general rule. It’s not that people in the UK aren’t brave, bold and interesting and it’s not that all the work here is conservative but I think we’re going through a very puritan phase in relation to work for children. People like to know what they’re getting and therefore the whole bums on seats things seems to be going with known titles, literary adaptations etc and I’ve done a fair share of them but it’s not all there is.

How do you know what children will like?

I think it must be a lot to do with the many years that I spent creating work at the old Playhouse in Leeds and taking it to schools on a daily basis. I think it’s one of those things that you just gradually learn. But I do still ask the question ‘what’s the story for the kids in the audience?’ all the time.

In Cinderella the story focussed on the loss of her mother and the audience were really emotionally invested in this. What’s your interpretation of Aladdin? Is there an equivalent emotional strand?

I’ve got this book called The Seven Basic Plots, it’s a very thick book based on theory, and interestingly Aladdin and Cinderella are included as the same basic plot which is a rags to riches plot. But to me they feel very different. And in a way Cinderella is a lot easier than Aladdin because things happen to Cinderella in the beginning that she has no part in. For an audience it’s very easy to identify with because it calls to the bit of you that feels that ‘this is so unfair, your parents die and you’re landed in terrible circumstances and subject to the most extreme abuse’. Everybody on a bad day can relate to that, whatever age, whether it’s real or imagined, we’ve all had days like that.

 Aladdin is different because Aladdin is more active in his own situation. He can choose. He’s reliant on his mother, he’s totally dependent, he’s not doing much to help and he gets this shortcut, the magic lamp and the three wishes, a shortcut to happiness, and he’s pretty terrible in his decision making about how to use it. So, I’m asking people to identify with him but it doesn’t call to the victim in us it calls to the person who doesn’t necessarily do the right thing, who wishes they had a shortcut. I have that desire too. X-Factor comes to mind as a contemporary example of a fast-track to success and happiness. On Saturday night you won’t catch me going out! I’ll be at home waiting to find out who gets sent home by Simon Cowell and the other judges!

Gail McIntyre and I had lots of conversations about how younger children would relate to Aladdin as the essence of the experience of the younger age group is that, unlike him, they have no power over their situation. We decided that for them it is a ‘what if?’ exploration of the subject.

Parents accompanying their children to the performance enjoy your work just as much as the younger audience. Do you think a lot about the adult’s experience of the play?

I think whatever age you are you could be implicated in trying to impress someone with money or with cleverness which is not coming from anywhere authentic. That’s what happens in Aladdin. I took my influence for the princess from Paris Hilton. She’s at the opposite end of the financial spectrum to Aladdin. She’s always had everything she’s ever wanted. But she won’t accept fakes and it gets clearer and clearer to Aladdin through the piece that he is absolutely a fake. So that’s where the dramatic tension lies between them and they both go on a journey for authenticity which I think applies across the board for children and adults. It’s about being real and honest.

Your version of Aladdin has been described as a contemporary re-telling…

I got a bit worried for a while about its Middle Eastern provenance. I felt that panto and Disney versions went down this mock turban, curly toed shoes, big guards with swords, women behind closed walls and veils route which feels to me like stereotype and I wanted to do something different.

So, I did a lot of research about it and found out that there’s no authentic first version of Aladdin, nobody’s discovered an Arabic version that wasn’t first translated from French.  It’s thought to be from the 18th Century around the time of the first collections of the Arabian nights stories coming to the west so it was kind of created as a piece of exotica.  As there is no authentic version I think that by now we all own it, magic lamps and genies and carpets and endless deserts are a part of our psychology as much as gingerbread cottages and wolves.  And because we all own it, myself as much as anyone else, I decided I could do what I like and disregard some of the Middle Eastern elements if I wanted.

The central image is very much about buying and selling and having and getting and keeping so we set the whole piece in the market place, all of the things we create are rustled up out of the market and off the market stalls. We looked at the souks of Morocco and Marrakesh and eastern markets too and took a lot of influences from those but we also drew influence from closer to home. Subsequently the set looks like a forgotten corner of Leeds Market and there’s a mixture of people and voices that you would see and hear there. So, yes it’s contemporary but not contemporary in a mobile phone, sneakers, rapping kind of way. That’s something you’ll never find in my plays, attempts to ‘get down with the kids.’

Do you ever write for adults?

Occasionally I do. I have just done a very adult piece for radio 3 which feels very grand. It’s an adaptation of a book called The Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. After Christmas I’m working on another very adult piece called Passing On which had a workshop at the Capital Centre at Warwick University. The medical school at Warwick had been conducting research at a hospital in Nuneaton that had a very high level of mortality within 48 hours of a person entering hospital. They interviewed relatives, consultants, porters, vicars, nurses etc. and collated an amazing body of research. A colleague of mine, Claudette Bryanston, a fellow at the Centre, realised what an amazing theatre resource this would be. Claudette and I had been talking for years about doing a piece about ageing with a life size puppet and so we’re interpreting the research theatrically. We’re working with The Little Angel in Islington, who are finding a puppet and puppeteer, to chart the journey between the phone call being made, which sends the old person in the hospital, through to the death on the general ward. It just so happened, this was two years ago now, just before we discovered that research, that my mum had died in just those circumstances in a corner of a general ward in a hospital. So I felt like I also had something to say. That piece will go out next year.

It sounds very different!

Although in some ways it isn’t because in my plays for very young children I’m always returning to death and old age.

In the past you’ve done some innovative work with disabled-led theatre company Graeae. Do you have any future plans with this company?

Jenny Sealy, the artistic director of Graeae, and I keep having meetings.  Last time we were talking we discussed doing a piece with and about children who know they won’t live long. At some point we’ll have to gird our loins and be brave and begin to explore that.  The disability world has been changed somewhat by all the service men and women who have been injured, and we might look at that as well. However, I feel like with subjects like that I have to get to a stage where I can claim ownership, that I’ve got something to say and that I have the right to say it. That can take a very long time for me to get to. It’s not as simple as having ideas. I remember reading something years ago in a Sunday paper about a 60’s drag queen in New York who said ‘Speak only of those things to which you can claim ownership’ and I absolutely believe that.