If you’ve ever found yourself trying to teach Shakespeare to kids,
I would recommend that you start with Macbeth.
It’s a nice, concise story.
There’s a murder about every ten minutes –
keeps everybody interested.
It’s full of manipulation, deception, back-stabbing –
all things that children are very familiar with from the playground.
And nobody falls in love!
I mean falling in love is great, but nobody wants to act it out,
particularly not children.
Uck.
But this story starts with a production of Macbeth
at the National Theatre in Yangon.
Has anyone ever been to the National Theatre?
Yeah, it’s not the most beautiful place,
a rather inauspicious starting place.
But I was putting on a play of Macbeth there,
and this was a play like no other.
It had 250 children starring in it,
from incredibly diverse backgrounds.
We had children from monastery schools,
from orphanages, from international schools,
and a big age range as well –
I think our youngest were six and our oldest were twenty-one.
And if you know Macbeth, you know there are witches.
And there is nothing more terrifying than a six-year-old witch.
(Laughter)
As we’ve just heard in the last talk,
the Myanmar education system is very rigid:
there is a right answer, and there is a wrong answer,
and there is no more difficult question than “What do you think?”
So when we were going into these local schools,
the orphanages and the monasteries,
you know, this is a play that is full of “What do you thinks?”
Who’s in the right? Who’s in the wrong? Who’s manipulating who?
Who’s a goodie? Who’s a baddie?
And it turns out, these children could think very creatively,
and after a few sessions,
they were much more comfortable expressing themselves.
And so after this insane rehearsal period –
of dashing around from one school to the next,
with one group of kids to the next –
each group had prepared a scene,
and we brought all those 250 children together
at the National Theatre
to perform Macbeth.
There’s a commuter train in Yangon; most of you have probably been on it.
It’s really bumpy, it’s uncomfortable, it’s hot,
and it runs in a 50 kilometer loop around the city –
my kids love going on it.
A few years ago,
my colleague suggested that we do a performance on one of these trains
at the hottest time of year.
Now, my producing head said, “No, this is a stupid idea.”
In fact, any common sense would say that this was a very stupid idea.
But he chipped away at me,
and eventually the beauty of the idea won me around.
And so we did this on a tiny, tiny budget –
this motley crew of local artists
and a few artists from the expat community
put together this show on a five-carriage train.
And it stopped at three stations along the way.
And it was an absolutely ridiculous thing to do.
(Laughter)
But it was also one of the most memorable days that I’ve had in Yangon.
And people still come up to me and talk about that crazy day on the train.
Before I moved to Myanmar, I was a producer.
I used to work at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.
Shakespeare’s Globe is a replica of Shakespeare’s theater,
and they’re famous for producing productions of Shakespeare plays,
obviously.
And a few years ago, one of the producers called me up
to ask about the possibility of performing Hamlet here in Myanmar,
as part of their global tour.
And I was really excited about this
because I’d been using Shakespeare texts for cross-cultural performances
since the Macbeth in 2013,
and Shakespeare’s great for cross-cultural performances
because he understood what so many people forget:
is that people, they’re just people.
And his characters and his stories, they echo through the years.
So these plays, that were written 400 years ago,
still resonate with people now,
still resonate in a country
that is so far away from where those plays were written,
but they’re just about people.
And people are just people.
And here was an opportunity for me to get these kids along
to see Shakespeare’s Globe perform Hamlet.
So we went to a lot of these groups,
and we ran workshops
so that they would know what the play was all about.
And then we brought them along
to see the show in the ballroom at the Strand Hotel.
So, we’ve got Shakespeare’s Globe
in Myanmar.
We’ve got a show on a commuter train,
and we’ve got 250 children
performing a bilingual Macbeth at the National Theatre.
Come with me. There is a thread.
When we staged Hamlet, 1,000 people came and saw that show.
Five hundred of them paid $50 a ticket, admittedly some of them quite grudgingly.
But the other 500 couldn’t have dreamt of paying $50 for a ticket,
would never have dreamt
of seeing Shakespeare’s Globe perform Hamlet.
Until really quite recently,
it was illegal to gather in large groups in public spaces.
And so when 250 people turned up at Yangon Central Station
to see a show on a train,
a few eyebrows were raised.
And then when that train pulled into a station in the outskirts of Yangon
and those 250 people rolled out of the train
to see a seemingly spontaneous choreographed dance,
underneath all the smiles and the laughter,
something interesting and significant was going on
with the democratization of space.
The National Theatre – it was built in 1991,
when I’m told that all the interesting people in Myanmar
were either in jail or in the jungle.
And the next 25 years,
that stage had been the preserve of the Myanmar elite,
through the darkest years of military rule.
And here were 250 children performing a play in Burmese and English
about power and corruption.
Nothing political there.
Or nothing overtly political.
In fact, nothing overtly political about any of this work.
But –
and this is my first point –
creative public projects,
they don’t need to have a massive budget,
but what they can do, if they’re done well,
is create moments, shared experiences.
And these shared experiences
provide moments of complete solidarity
and just momentary equality.
And these moments are absolutely fundamental to a democracy.
I was running a class recently for young children,
five- and six-year-olds,
and I was asking the children,
“How would you represent time on stage?”
And there was a lot of, you know, ticking-clock hands,
and there was sort of wind-up clock-work things.
And there was this one girl,
she got down on all fours, like this,
and if you know yoga, you’ll know that that’s the downward dog.
If you know yoga, you probably know that I don’t know yoga.
(Laughter)
And I did what all adults do when they have no idea what a child is doing –
I tried to ignore her, and I just hoped it would go away, but it didn’t go away.
It was right there in the middle of the room,
and eventually I had to ask,
“Wha- what’s this? How does this represent time?”
And she said, “I’m the times table.”
Brilliant.
I mean, what an amazing cognitive leap that is not open to us as adults,
but for a child, that’s perfectly logical.
And that creativity is key to facing the future.
We don’t know what Myanmar is going to look like in five years time,
twenty years time,
not a clue.
But if we can nurture that cognitive agility,
then there’s hope.
Now, I run a lot of workshops for different age groups,
sometimes in English, sometimes with a translator.
Unfortunately, my Myanmar’s not quite up to it yet.
And there is one game that works across the board,
and it’s a very, very simple game.
It’s called, “Yes, let’s.”
I put people in pairs, and you got Person A, Person B.
Person A has to make a suggestion,
and that suggestion cannot be constrained by reality.
And whatever they say, Person B has to say, “Yes, let’s.”
And then it’s Person B’s turn.
So Person A might say something like, “Let’s go to the moon.”
“Yes, let’s.”
Brrrrroooooooom –
and they’re off.
And it doesn’t matter how old you are, what language you speak,
what your religion is –
it really doesn’t matter.
Once you give them permission
to go on that imaginative, creative flight of fancy,
you’ll go
because that instinct is in every single person,
and it crosses borders, it crosses boundaries.
And these are the two foundation stones that sit underneath all of this.
Number one: all children are artists –
in fact, no, forget that – all people are artists.
All people are artists;
it’s just that children are a bit better at it.
They’re better at making mistakes,
they’re more genuine in their inquiries,
and they are far more generous
in receiving ideas that they are not immediately comfortable with.
And number two is that that creative urge,
that urge just to drop all the cultural baggage
and just go on an amazing, imaginative flight of fancy –
that crosses all borders.
Now, I’m just going to take you back now to that production in 2013.
One of the schools that was involved in that is a monastery school.
Now, you’ve heard about some monastery schools earlier today.
They’re very common across Myanmar.
They basically, quite often,
provide a safety net for the state education system.
Often children will go there
because they can’t afford to stay in the state system.
It might be that they are from a very rural area
where there is no state school.
There’s lots of areas that have been afflicted by conflict in Myanmar.
Often, the children, if there’s no school, they get sent away to a monastery school.
So some of them are residential.
A lot of the parents of these children live in slums,
which is unofficial housing, so they don’t have an official address.
And this particular monastery school
does a very good line helping the children of those parents get an ID card.
An ID card is obviously integral;
you can’t get a job, you can’t get a driving license,
you can’t vote without an ID card.
So you need an official address, or you can’t do it – this school is good at that.
Another one of those schools is an international school.
International schools are less common throughout Myanmar.
We get a few in Yangon.
They generally teach in English.
They’re generally – they’ll be a fee-paying school,
quite expensive,
and they cater for people who are moving around a lot,
and so their children can have continuity of education.
This particular international school has children from all over the world,
but also it educates a lot of the children of the Myanmar elite.
Two very, very different childhoods.
And my realization with this project
was that once those children stepped on stage,
it was exactly the same experience.
Two childhoods you couldn’t imagine more different.
And yet, when they stepped on stage,
and they’d finished the last rehearsal,
and the blood was pumping,
and the nerves were tingling,
and the butterflies were fluttering,
and all the eyes were looking up at them –
none of that background mattered.
It was just a perfect, tiny moment of absolute equality.
Now, I’m not completely deluded;
I don’t think I’m going to transform the world.
Some of these kids, maybe they’ll be a little bit more creative,
maybe they’ll be better at working in a team,
maybe they’ll have made new friends.
I’m pretty sure all of those kids
will remember that bearded white guy who came and played games with them.
And that’s great, because play is very important to children.
But what I do know is that creativity,
the creative process, any creative process –
theater, dance, music, gardening, programming –
it creates moments of solidarity and absolute equality.
And it’s just a moment.
But surely that’s better than none at all.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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