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ARTICLE TITLE: Playing on the great stage of fools: Shakespeare and dramaturgic pedagogy

ARTICLE AUTHOR: Kelman, Dave

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 Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied
Theatre and Performance

ISSN: 1356-9783 (Print) 1470-112X (Online) Journal homepage: [Link]/journals/crde20

Playing on the great stage of fools: Shakespeare

and dramaturgic pedagogy

Dave Kelman & Jane Rafe

To cite this article: Dave Kelman & Jane Rafe (2013) Playing on the great stage of fools:
Shakespeare and dramaturgic pedagogy, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied
Theatre and Performance, 18:3, 282-295, DOI: 10.1080/13569783.2013.810924

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RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 2013
Vol. 18, No. 3, 282
295, [Link]

Playing on the great stage of fools: Shakespeare and dramaturgic

pedagogy
Dave Kelman* and Jane Rafe

School of Graduate Education, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

An artists’ residency in a primary school in regional Victoria Australia staged a

production of Shakespeare’s King Lear in a local theatre. A qualitative, reflective
practitioner research study into this project collected and analysed data from
participating children and their community audience that gave some insight into
their experience of the project. This article examines the processes used by
teacher-artists to develop the children’s understanding of the play and to create a
hybrid performance text that engaged a large community audience. It inter-
rogates key artistic decisions made by teacher-artists in adapting Shakespeare’s
play. It theorises this project in relation to the dramaturgical and pedagogic
approaches underpinning the script adaptation and devising processes used to
generate this Shakespearean performance. The role of dramaturg included the
education of both actors and audience and bridging the gap between the roles of
writer and director to weave words and dramatic action into a performance text.
This practice constitutes what may be termed a ‘dramaturgical pedagogy’ and has
a wider potential application in drama education practice.

A keynote speaker1 at the Australian Theatre Industry Forum in Brisbane in 2011 listed
among his recent theatre highlights a production of King Lear performed by primary
school children in a city in regional Victoria. The children concerned come from a
significantly economically disadvantaged community, attending a school whose
national testing results are well below the national average. This group of 24 grade
5/6 students (10- to 12-years-old) included children whose school attendance was
irregular and a high proportion (around 20%) with significant learning difficulties. This
project was directed by the authors, leading a team of teacher-artists from the
Education Programme of Western Edge Youth Arts, an artists-in-schools programme
based in Melbourne.
So, why did we attempt to produce what is perhaps Shakespeare’s most
challenging tragedy in this context? How did we go about such a task, what artistic
choices did we make along the way and what did the young people and their wider
community make of the whole experience? This article aims to explore these
questions and, in doing so, places dramaturgy at the centre of a performance-based
pedagogy.
This qualitative, reflective practitioner study was conducted by the teacher-artists
leading the project, working in collaboration with Western Edge Youth Arts and
Deakin University. The project took place over sixteen weeks with a one and a half

*Corresponding author. Email: dave@[Link]

# 2013 Taylor & Francis
 Research in Drama Education 283

hour drama workshop and a one-hour creative writing workshop delivered weekly in
the school by teacher-artists working closely with class teachers. We use the term
‘teacher-artist’ because it implies an equal balance between the two roles, rather than
‘teaching-artist’, which implies primacy of the ‘artist’ function. Most of the data was
gathered at the end of the project, after the children had performed their adaptation
of King Lear at a local theatre to a community audience of around three hundred
people. This data included: group interviews with the children and their teachers
(audio recorded and transcribed), young people’s creative writing and audience
response surveys. The data was transcribed, analysed, categorised thematically (e.g.
‘character’, ‘process’ and ‘choice of an ending’) and interpreted as a research
narrative. The children’s quoted comments emerged from dialogic group interviews
with teacher-artists and researchers about specific theatrical moments, so the data
came from an engagement in the work, rather than from an outside perspective. All
students were interviewed, and all were positive about the experience, however a
significant section of the group (around 30%) made only broad statements about
gaining confidence and having had fun (both were dominant themes in the data).
We have used illustrative quotations representing strong themes that emerged in
the data
the importance of story or the valuing of Shakespeare’s language for
example
working from the premise that the children’s experience of the project can
be best understood through the reflections of the group’s more articulate members
(around 30%). This is problematic of course
their experience of the project may
have been very different to their more reticent peers’, although there was no data to
indicate this
but seeing the project through this lens is an important way of gaining
insight into the work, since they are closer to their peers than we are. There were a
number of children who, in the opinion of their teachers and teacher-artists, engaged
and performed at a high level but were unwilling or unable to analyse it effectively
afterwards. We found data obtained from audience response surveys provided a
significant community perspective and have drawn from it extensively. There was a
great deal of very significant data
both interviews and children’s creative writing
generated as part of the project
for which there was no space here, but which
indicates a thoughtful engagement in the work by every one of the children. If, as
Winston states, ‘tensions between description and explanation, observation and
interpretation are at the heart of the meaning making process in any research event’
(2006, 47) then it is in this complex and contested space that this study is situated.
Returning to the questions posed above, the first one to be considered is surely, why
King Lear for primary aged children? It is after all, a play about an old man. Furthermore it
is a bleak play, one that Peter Brook describes as ‘a vast, complex, coherent poem
designed to study the power and the emptiness of nothing’ (1972, 105). The play
presents a cruel world of broken families, betrayal, madness and pain, and whilst there is
also love, friendship and arguably redemption, the play as a whole is ‘worryingly lacking
in moral order’ (Bate 1997, 150). But, as the Royal Shakespeare Company put it in their
‘Manifesto’: ‘Shakespeare’s genius is in harnessing the power of language and crafting it
to tell stories which reflect us, our preoccupations and our relations’ (RSC 2008, 6). Our
approach to this project ignored ‘New Historicism’ (Nuttall 2007, 23) and focused on the
contemporary resonance of Shakespeare, reinterpreting the work in its current
sociocultural context. Having made the decision to immerse these children in this
most challenging of plays, we felt responsible for ensuring that it was a positive and
284 D. Kelman and J. Rafe

meaningful experience for them; one that set up the possibility of future encounters
with complex art, rather than continuing to build walls of cultural exclusion.
The project began with ten weekly workshops exploring the play’s characters and
plot ‘on the floor’, weaving together text work, process drama
including the
extensive use of teacher-in-role and modelling by teacher-artists, small-group
improvisation and presentation and whole group role-play. This was a process of
generating collective ownership, similar to that outlined in the RSC ‘Manifesto’,
building ‘a shared understanding of the play’ (2008, 3). Where our approach differed
from that of the RSC was in the subsequent crafting of a hybrid text, combining
Shakespeare with new writing generated from the devising process. The resulting
playscript was then carefully cast on an ensemble basis
with ‘main’ parts being
shared by a number of actors and every child having at least two speaking roles

then rehearsed and further refined over the final six weeks of the project. For the
length of the project, separate creative writing workshops were run on a weekly basis.
This was the third project we had run for this school community and the nature of
the performance text was informed by our prior experience of working with the
children on complex texts (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey) and staging community
performances for their families. In generating our King Lear text we had to take into
account time constraints, high levels of learning difficulties and behavioural issues in
the group, as well as the low ‘reading age’ of more than half the class. We also
considered audience response data from previous shows indicating the community’s
expectation of comedy and entertainment; we were aware too of what we felt had
been some inappropriate laughter during emotionally charged moments and deeply
serious scenes from some audience members in previous performances, indicating
perhaps a lack of comfort with dramatically challenging content. The final
performance text needed to address all of these factors, ensuring that it was fully
inclusive of performers and audience. The final script included edited Shakespeare
scenes, scenes interweaving Shakespeare with new writing and some wholly original
scenes that we will consider below. In our view, this represented a significant
engagement with Shakespeare’s complex play by these children. Our decision to
create a hybrid work was not a generic approach to teaching disadvantaged children
Shakespeare, but rather was an artistic/pedagogical response to a particular context.
It is our contention that the process of arriving at our hybrid King Lear text was
fundamentally dramaturgical and examining it in that frame will help illuminate what
happened in this project and why it might be more broadly significant. This
statement immediately begs the question: what do we mean by a ‘dramaturgical
process’? The role of the dramaturg in the mainstream theatre in the Anglophone
world has a history of marginality and suspicion: ‘In the English speaking West the
history of dramaturgy exposes persistent struggles over the control of creative
territories’ (Luckhurst 2006, 2). Dramaturgy has, however, been at the centre of
mainland European theatre movements since the 1930s, and in recent decades
dramaturgy has become more firmly established in the theatre industry in Australia,
UK and North America. It is still, however, a term that resists definition and means
different things to different people depending on the nature of their practice (Copelin
2005, 17
25; Turner and Behrndt 2008, 17). Writing about dramaturgy in relation to
drama education, Allern defines it as ‘a concept that explains how drama is composed
in order to have an intended effect on an audience’ and ‘the art of telling and
 Research in Drama Education 285

performing’ (Allern 2008, 322
3). This emphasis on dramatic composition and

storytelling with a particular audience in mind is highly relevant to this project.
The most obvious role of the dramaturg in a production of King Lear for primary
children is the adaptation of the script
a task based on ‘dramaturgical analysis’
(Turner and Behrndt 2008, 43). In this project, this involved re-contextualising the play
in Australia, selecting and editing sections of Shakespeare’s text and interweaving
these with new text written by ourselves (including some entirely original scenes) in a
process of deconstructing Shakespeare’s play and reconstructing a new performance
text. So, was this in fact a production of Shakespeare’s King Lear at all, or a new hybrid
play created for its context? The answer is that it was both. In an examination of
dramaturgy and Shakespeare, Hartley (2005, 43
5) outlines a spectrum of approaches
that are open to the dramaturg, from seeking the ‘authenticity’ of the historical text
(itself highly problematic) to adaptations that move progressively further away from
the original text towards a new work. As Hartley points out there is no fixed point at
which a production ceases to be Shakespeare and becomes something else, not least
because Shakespeare’s plays are more than the poetry in which they are written:

Shakespeare is a cultural force, albeit an amorphous one, interwoven with the politics of
art, education, and culture in its broadest sense. (2005, 44)

Our starting point as teacher-artists was that it was through story that the children
would find meaning. Our first dramaturgical decision was setting our play in a post-
apocalyptic Australia, in which devastating climate change has led to societal
collapse, resulting in a post-technological, semi-feudal society. Re-contextualising the
work made it more geographically immediate to the children and their community
and helped make a seemingly remote story more relevant to their world
as
illustrated by this quote from a girl about her experience of playing Cordelia: ‘In the
badlands, I had a picture in my mind, like the Australian outback, red dirt, nothing
much to survive on’. Audience Response Survey data showed a high proportion of
the respondents commenting favourably on the local setting, which they saw as
adding ‘relevance’ to the work, for example:

Liked how you were keeping the children interested by adding a modern and local edge to
the story . . . the adaptation of local setting to make it relevant to audience and students.

I liked that I knew all the towns mentioned.

This decision also freed us up to invent a world in which the events of Shakespeare’s
King Lear could be de-constructed, selected and rearranged to make the story more
immediate. Comments from participants at the end of the project indicate the
importance of story for the children:

I will remember the stories most.

Shakespeare is more interesting than normal plays, these stories from old times . . .

Although the story was important, we also had a commitment to Shakespeare’s

poetry, which we saw as integral to the work and its significance. For example, the
whole project started with teacher-artists leading the children in a choral reading of
Lear’s speech on the heath ‘Blow winds and crack your cheeks . . .’ (by the third week
286 D. Kelman and J. Rafe

some of them knew it by heart) with further work on Shakespeare’s text in the
creative writing sessions. In each workshop, teacher-artists were integrating
Shakespeare’s language, and demonstrating how the poetry added layers of
complexity and subtlety to the play. Sometimes the children were improvising a
scene but were given three key lines from Shakespeare (on paper) that they had to
use as part of the scene; or, they might act out a scene using modern language, but a
teacher-artist would pause the action to offer a line from Shakespeare as an addition
to, or enhancement of a moment they had created; or, the children might watch
teacher-artists act an extract from Shakespeare, be asked to interpret it, and then re-
create it themselves with as much of the Shakespeare text (extracts given on paper)
as they could manage; or they might hot-seat one of the teacher-artists as Lear or
Cordelia for example, and that actor would incorporate Shakespeare’s text into their
responses. The dramaturgical role for the teacher-artists here was indeed a literary
one; they had to know and understand Shakespeare’s play well enough to be able to
select and edit key scenes both as prepared raw material for the drama workshops,
and through a process of reflection-in-action when working on the floor with the
children and deciding what text to use in a given moment.
This process relates closely to Turner and Behrndt’s description of what they call
‘on-the-spot’ dramaturgy within a devising process:

(Dramaturgs) ‘in their suggestions, beginning to link moments together and are thus in
the process of ‘writing’ or, perhaps, ‘wrighting’ the dramaturgy inside the rehearsal
process. Thus the dramaturg is a creative collaborator within the artistic process,
engaged in on-the-spot dramaturgical composition’. (2008, 180)

This is a description of dramaturgy within a professional theatre devising process, but

it closely parallels our process in this project. Reflection on this experience provided
us with a basis for deciding how much original text each individual child might be
able to memorise and, more importantly, comprehend. The extent to which the
process was effective may be judged by considering the data from the children,
which is strongly positive about the Shakespearean language and its impact; in this
comment, Chloe2 directly links the story to the language in which it is expressed:

The words he uses, it goes deep more, for the audience and the actor. The story is the
Shakespeare; if you don’t tell it in the way he sees it, no one gets the story. I would go to
bed and dream about the story, what would happen before and after what we’d done [in
the session that day]. And dream the actual Shakespeare words . . . .

Showing great perception, she sees the poetry and the narrative as indivisible,
revealing the deep impact the words had on her conscious and subconscious mind.
Another participant, Bentley, also made a powerful statement about the importance
of the language:

It’s not a Shakespeare play if you don’t have Shakespeare words, it’s not the same. You
have to have that old language
they might mean the same but it’s a different sound.

The comments illustrate some of the children’s understanding of the importance and
beauty of the poetry, but they do not alter the fact that most of them found it hard to
understand and extremely difficult to learn. This comment from one of the girls, who
 Research in Drama Education 287

according to her teacher was one of the most capable in terms of literacy, indicates
the nature of this struggle:

Some of the Shakespeare was very hard to learn . . . and you had to change that line for
me cos it just didn’t make sense to me . . . so I never could remember it.

She is describing how a teacher-artist had to insert a word into a line of Shakespeare
in order for it to ‘make sense’, before she could learn it. Without that intervention, she
was unable to process the archaic language in the rehearsal process.
The following comments give some insight into how the exploratory sessions laid
the foundation for engagement with the script:

Chloe: From the beginning, even before the script, you’ve acted the story, you know the
scenes . . . .

Ciaran: The process gives us enough time to get settled in to the story and the characters
before we get the script. If we started with the script, it would have thrown us off, we
wouldn’t be at the top of our game. The process really helped us get into the mood.

Carly: It was pretty serious.

What comes across here is the sense of gradual immersion into the world of the play
through character, story and mood. For at least some of the young people, this sense
was generated through the intensity of acting Shakespeare’s characters, as these
responses illustrate:

Chloe: Well I look at what the character is saying, and I look at the story behind it, like I
knew [with Cordelia] ‘‘she got banished’’ so I had that in my head all the time.

Georgia: With Regan just seeing what she does! [poking out Gloucester’s eye]. Just try
and think what she is.

Tess: [Acting Edgar] I’m not sure but I felt like it was my actual father being blinded, I felt
like it was real when I was acting, I just forgot about the play, I just acted it out and just
pretended it was real.

Adam: Things begin to crumple
going mad
forgetting yourself, you can actually put
yourself in Lear’s shoes, you can feel it.

Tess: [Acting Lear] He’s sick of life and he just doesn’t want to be here anymore, he’s had
it, he wants to be gone . . . it felt like a real storm.

They describe a process of taking the events of the play and relating them to their
own lives to try and make them feel as authentic as possible. There is a sense of them
starting to understand the characters at a deep level, although as casting was carried
out on an ensemble basis, with ‘main’ parts being shared by a number of actors, the
emotional journey for each actor was interrupted (as one boy pointed out in an
interview).
As with the teaching of any difficult content, the key was to vary the task, in this
instance, moving between a variety of theatrical approaches and performance styles.
Some scenes were heavily worded and character based
the initial scene in which
Lear divides his kingdom and rejects Cordelia for example
others were more
288 D. Kelman and J. Rafe

obviously based on dramatic action
Kent in the stocks or the shocking plucking out
of Gloucester’s eyes [described by Bate as ‘the most appalling act of on-stage
dismemberment’ (1997, 274)]. The scene in which Lear rants at the storm was realised
as more abstract physical theatre with chanted Shakespearean poetry. This
simultaneous development of form and narrative closely relates to two of three
dramaturgies that Barba identifies in his practice (we shall come to the third one in
due course):

(1) An organic or dynamic dramaturgy, which is the composition of the rhythms

and dynamisms affecting the spectators on a nervous, sensorial and sensual
level.
(2) A narrative dramaturgy, which interweaves events and characters, informing
the spectators on the meaning of what they are watching. (Barba 2000, 60)

This weaving together of dramatic and narrative elements to create a performance

‘text’ is the essence of Barba’s dramaturgy:

That which concerns the ’text’ (the weave) of the performance can be defined as
‘dramaturgy’
that is, drama-ergon, work, the ‘work of the actions’ in the performance.
The way in which the actions work is the plot. It is not always possible to distinguish
between what in the dramaturgy of a performance may be called ‘direction’ and what
may be called the ‘writing’ of the author. (Barba 1985, 75)

Here Barba is working from a very broad definition of ‘actions’ by which he means the
actions of performers, use of space, sound and technical elements that are the
language in which the narrative is delivered. Dramaturgy, then, inhabits the space
between direction and writing and encompasses both, combining the development
of form and style with ‘structural thinking’, the emerging understanding of ‘how
shape or structure affects interpretation’ (Turner and Behrndt 2008, 164). This
approach encompasses narrative theory, in which there is a strong relationship
between a narrative sequence and its meaning; this Bruner refers to as the ‘rule of
sequence’, which holds that it is ‘sequentiality that is indispensible to a story’s
significance’ (Bruner 1990, 44). The ‘reading’ of a particular performance text concerns
the interplay of dramatic form and narrative to generate meaning:

. . . a story is understood not only in terms of what happens, but in terms of the ways in
which we recount it, order it, negotiate it, structure it. The ‘narratives’ of all these works
are not merely structures of linked events, but forms that encapsulate questions, affects,
emotions, stories and discourses. (Turner and Behrndt 2008, 29)

In this project such considerations of narrative and form led to the creation of new
scenes that re-shaped the narrative and the meaning of Shakespeare’s play. As the
children explored the play, the character they identified with most readily was
Cordelia. This is unsurprising
she is Shakespeare’s heroine and closest in age to that
of the actors. It is her refusal to play Lear’s game at the start of the play that cracks
open the fairy tale simplicity of his plan and opens ‘a black hole . . . in the fabric of the
play’ (Nuttall 2007, 305). This act of rebellion resonated strongly with pre-teen
children, perhaps just starting to test their own powers of resistance to adult
authority. This is how Maeve, acting King Lear, experienced the moment:
 Research in Drama Education 289

Lear, he changes in front of everyone. There’s frustration [when Cordelia won’t say how
much she loves him]
he wanted her to brag like Goneril and Regan but because
she doesn’t, there’s a moment of silence. He goes a bit mad
‘did she actually say
that?’

Silences on stage are deep moments and can be hard for younger actors to create
and utilise effectively so when she talks about ‘a moment of silence’ there is a sense
that this moment is both loaded with meaning and consciously created by the actor.
In creating the play script, teacher-artists had the banished Cordelia wander
through the badlands of Lear’s collapsing kingdom. Chloe, one of the girls who acted
Cordelia describes her situation:

She’s in disguise. She doesn’t want anyone to know who she is
they’ll treat her
differently. She wants to see what the world is like. [Previously] with her sisters bullying
her, her father taking care of her . . . . now it’s just her on her own with nothing.

To develop this narrative strand we wrote new scenes in which Cordelia met with a
band of ‘travelling players’, who made a living by performing satirical comedy ‘street
theatre’ versions of the news from Lear’s court to the people of his kingdom. These
scenes had their genesis in the earlier process drama exploration of the post-
apocalyptic world/setting of our play. Teacher-artists first suggested the idea of
‘travelling players’ as part of that exploration and the group had improvised an
encounter between them and Cordelia. When the travelling player scenes were
included in the final playscript the children felt recognition and ownership of this
material. Dramaturgically, these added scenes served a number of functions:

(1) They reiterated key elements of ‘the story so far’ for audience and cast
members who might have felt challenged by the number of characters and
sub-plots (not least because each actor was playing a variety of roles as part
of the ensemble basis on which the work was created).
(2) The travelling players are essentially clowns (a boy described the King of the
Travelling Players thus: ‘He wears a Fool’s hat, he runs a Fool’s business’) and
their appearances lightened the mood, changing the dramatic form by
providing physical comedy, music, dance and an element of absurdity. The
scenes also provided the children with a degree of protection from the
violent and disturbing events of Lear’s world.
(3) This device reiterated the story as a dramatised ‘folk tale’ told by the travelling
players, reinterpreting what is a disturbing and complex play about madness
and cruelty in a more familiar narrative form, which was less demanding than
the Shakespearean drama, because folk story is a simpler and more didactic
narrative genre (Winston 1998, 46).

The space in the work created by these scenes allowed the children and their
audience to pause and reflect on the confronting events they were witnessing before
the next instalment of tragedy. Both the interview data and the audience response
surveys indicate that these scenes were popular with cast and audience alike: ‘Loved
the Players’ joyful scenes’ (Audience Response Survey).
This radical alteration to Shakespeare’s script sits within what Allern defines as
‘classical dramaturgy’ because it maintains the illusion of ‘reality’ in the work:
290 D. Kelman and J. Rafe

There is a dynamic in classical dramaturgy between illusion and fiction, and how this
dynamic is treated will make a difference. The action should be plausible. The action is
presented as if it is happening ‘here and now’, i.e. the performance creates an illusion
which makes the action seem to be a ‘real’ action. (Allern 2008, 327)

The scenes, however, do create what Allern describes as a ‘distance from the illusion’
in which the illusion is ‘subverted’ making an audience more aware of the story they
are watching without breaking the barrier between the stage and the audience.
Shakespeare’s own dramaturgy works in this way (though clearly at a far more
sophisticated level) in the extraordinary scene in which Edgar tricks his blinded father
Gloucester into thinking he has been led to a cliff’s edge so that he may kill himself.
The children who played Edgar and Gloucester in a simplified version of this scene
rated it very highly and talked about the emotional intensity of the moment:

Tess: I felt like it was my actual father being blinded, I felt like it was real.

Adam: Getting re-united with Edgar was my favourite part to act. All of the emotion . . .
when I say ‘Edgar’ . . . Shakespeare gives you a wider range as an actor . . . .

In performance, some of the audience responded to this scene with laughter and
then applause. Our reading of this response is that some people thought Edgar was
really helping his father to kill himself and were laughing at his cruelty (the ‘poor
theatre’ production design may have made the scene hard to read for a non-theatre
going audience), whilst others were laughing at Edgar’s trick. The applause came
when the audience realised what Edgar had done and was a response to the quality
of the performance. Bate cites Wittgenstein’s ‘remarkable meditation’ on this scene as
illustrating the ‘performative truth of human ‘‘being’’’ (Bate 1997, 332
3). How much
of this deep philosophical complexity was communicated by the children in their
performance is open to question, but the scene does serve to illustrate the
challenging nature of the performance and therefore the need, in our judgement,
to create moments of light relief and spaces for reflection.
Bate describes the ending of King Lear as the ‘most painful’ of Shakespeare’s tragic
endings (1997, 150). Initially, we introduced this scene to the children by performing
Lear’s famous entrance with Cordelia dead in his arms: ‘Howl, howl, howl, howl! Oh
you are men of stones . . . .’ Appropriately, they were slightly shocked by the horror of
what they were witnessing. This moment relates to the third of Barba’s three
dramaturgies, discussed above; it is what he refers to as the ‘dramaturgy of changing
states’:

In performance, this dramaturgy of changing states distils or captures hidden

significances, which are often involuntary on the part of the actors as well as the
director, and are different for every spectator. (Barba 2000, 60)

This complex understanding of dramaturgy is clearly a better fit when applied to the
virtuosic performance of Barba’s Odin Theatre than the work of primary age children,
but perhaps it does offer some further insight into the multifaceted nature of
dramaturgy even in this context. Consider the performance of 11-year-old Maeve.
Maeve wanted to succeed in this project and early on had read Shakespeare’s King
Lear from the first scene to the last, with no help or support, entirely of her own
volition.
 Research in Drama Education 291

Maeve: At first when I heard we were doing ‘King Lear’, I read the book
we could take
the book home
[the school purchased several copies of Shakespeare’s King Lear] and I
didn’t think we could pull it off. I had a dictionary next to me so I could follow it, look up
difficult words. Mum was used to me only reading chapter books! Then when I saw our
script I thought yes we could pull it off; comparing the script and the book [Shakespeare]
I thought it was good how you brought stuff from the book into the play.

Yet more than once in sessions she had stormed out, unable to cope with the
demands of the rehearsal process. In performance, she was Lear in his final tragic
moments, entering the space with Cordelia limp in her arms. This harrowing scene,
performed to her own community, was a theatrical moment which, while expressing
something of her personal pride and pain also transcended it, conveying Lear’s agony
through Shakespeare’s nihilistic poetry: ‘Never, never, never, never, never’. The
community audience watched in slightly shocked silence. This is how an experienced
drama educator from Deakin University described her performance:

The performances were absolutely terrific. Some were stunning. I especially loved it how
I could believe that a girl in grade six was Lear
she was so good.

After the performance, Maeve reflected on the scene in which Lear is reunited with
Cordelia:

I feel emotion in the reunion scene - for a second, I thought I was Lear. He’s different
from the middle of the play when he’s going nuts. It’s tragedy, how he gives up his
kingdom to Regan and Goneril and they throw it back in his face. Sometimes the world is
like that.

The depth of her experience
‘I thought I was Lear’
combined with an analysis of
how Lear changes throughout the play is then related to her own understanding of
life’s cruelties. She then added: ‘Before, people underestimated me’, indicating the
personal importance of the public performance.
As Barba implies, a dramaturg or director cannot plan for moments such as
Maeve’s performance of the final scene; they happen in performance, in this instance
when the vulnerabilities and courage of the child actor resonate with the story and
the poetry, adding unexpected dimensions of beauty and philosophic meaning. We
can, however, become more conscious of the dramaturgical processes that generate
such moments. In this context, process crystallised in performance into a ‘dramaturgy
of changing states’ in which an 11-year-old girl became a Shakespearean actor for her
own disadvantaged community and created a moment of dramatic tragedy. And yet,
despite the power of Shakespeare’s final scene, we took the radical dramaturgical
decision to offer the audience an alternative ‘happy ending’, instead of leaving them
with Shakespeare’s ending, as beautifully realised by Maeve. It was a decision based
on considerations of the needs of the cast and how their audience were likely to
respond to the play overall. Understanding the context of the work and how a
particular audience may be affected by a particular piece of theatre is a key facet of
dramaturgy and a vital role of the teacher-artist generating community performance:

If dramaturgy concerns the architecture of the theatrical event, we need to look at the
ways in which a performance or play is situated within the context of a community,
society and the world. (Turner and Behrndt 2008, 35)
292 D. Kelman and J. Rafe

Discussion with the cast about the possible ending for the performance had revealed a
strong (although not overwhelming) support for showing Shakespeare’s ending along
with an alternative happy ending after the original. In response
and acknowledging
that we are following a rather a dubious historical tradition (Bate 1997, 75)
the teacher-
artists created a new scene in which a ‘Voice-off’ Cordelia addresses the audience: ‘But
maybe it didn’t end like that . . . . It is just a story after all.’ In this moment the play crosses
over into what in Allern’s analysis is ‘epic dramaturgy’ by creating ‘an opportunity to alter
established power structures that form at the basis of the actions narrated in the drama’
(2008, 323). The travelling players re-entered with boisterous music and movement, and
Lear and Cordelia sat down together to watch them perform their buffoonish offerings,
in a sense fulfilling Lear’s words earlier in the play, which were transposed into this scene:
so we’ll live/And pray, and sing and tell old tales and laugh/At gilded butterflies . . . .
This decision was based on a carefully considered judgement that Shakespeare’s
dark ending wasn’t the right place to leave the children and their families after such a
challenging performance. As teacher-artists working on this project, we wanted to
provide the children with a sense of the depth and vision of Shakespeare’s play, but
to leave them with a sense of community celebration at the end of a long and
demanding project. This is how the children saw it,

Ciaran: The play wouldn’t be the same if it was just fun, we needed the seriousness. But I
liked the two endings of Lear. Younger people [than me] would probably like a happier
ending, older people like a sad ending. It would make little kids too sad with a sad ending.

Carly: I liked the tragic ending
it made more sense, plus, it was what William Shakespeare
wrote! He had lots of tragic endings. I like that.

Ciaran: Yes but we’re older, we like it, that’s a good example of the age group difference I
was meaning. Also the order of the endings is good, you don’t want to leave on a dark
note, everyone wants to leave on a happy feeling.

Joel: I liked the happy ending, I did, I thought it was better.

Chloe: I like the two endings, the ending is like happy-sad.

Sarah: It’s good to have both so people can see both ways
like ‘what would happen
then?’ It gives people the idea of writing a play of your own.

It is important to note the diversity of opinions within the group illustrated here and
in particular, Carly’s championing of Shakespeare’s tragic ending.
As with any project of this sort, each child took different things from the work and
experienced it at different levels. There is data that suggests it was a significant
experience at some level for all of them. Many spoke about gaining confidence and
their pride in being able to perform Shakespeare successfully, for example:

Georgia: A lot of stuff happens in Shakespeare . . . drama, comedy, sadness. You learn
courage and confidence. You can learn something if you put your mind to it.

Adam: Proudness, cos you’ve just played Shakespeare!

None of them either said Shakespeare was boring or that they didn’t want to do it
again, but perhaps that was unlikely, given that they were being interviewed by the
 Research in Drama Education 293

teacher-artists with whom they had worked closely. There is further data showing
that for some children the project provided a deep insight into King Lear, which was
reflected in their own art making practice. Consider, for example, these extracts from
Chloe’s poem, written as part of the project, from the perspective of different
characters in the play:

Cordelia:
My poor eyes
Streaming with water,
Broken my heart
Never to regain in strength . . .

The Fool:
Life is ruined,
Not for me
I’m just a Fool
I have no name
Lifeless to all . . .

Epilogue:
A ruler betrayed,
Becoming mad
A horrid place,
You can’t even imagine

Maybe you can.

This is a reflective practitioner research study and what emerged as we reviewed the
process and the outcome of the project is a pattern of dramaturgical decisions made
through Schön’s processes of reflection-in-action, on-action and through-action
(1995) about what we considered to be the best way to make King Lear accessible to
the children and their community. These decisions are open to challenge. Reflective
practice involves deep interrogation of the complex layers that underlie artistic
choices, a process of examining our assumptions and biases:

. . . questioning and analysing what constitutes tacit knowledge or norms that underpin
a choice, decision, or judgement; strategies and theories that support a choice, decision
or judgement; feelings in the moment that lead to a consideration, belief, value; biases
that come into play as problems are identified and framed contextually and roles played
out through interacting with others and creating change. (Burnard 2006, 10)

The crux of the matter in this case study is our decision to re-write Shakespeare’s King
Lear, providing an alternative ending (as well as the original ending) and ‘softening’
the work in ways that could be seen as patronising to the children and their
community. These decisions were, however, based on reflection-in-action through
the process and reflection-on-action in previous projects, enabling us to develop an
understanding of the children and their community in the context of the complex
dynamics of community performance. In the audience response data a positive
response to the mixing of ‘old and new’ in the hybrid text is a recurring theme (16/30
responses mentioned it positively, compared with only 3/30 who positively
294 D. Kelman and J. Rafe

mentioned the use of Shakespearean text). The visiting drama educator from Deakin
University read the audience’s engagement with the play as follows:

One thing I was trying to sense was how the audience was responding to the play and
how they were following things
and I looked around a few times to see
every time I
consciously looked I could see how ‘with’ the play they were.

Does this tell us that we got the balance of dark and light, Shakespeare and devised
work, right for this context, or that the audience were sufficiently engaged that they
could have been challenged further? The issues raised here go to the heart of our role
as teacher-artists making theatre for communities; when to challenge and confront
and when to pull back and reassure. How far can we take participants and audiences
without alienating them?
If dramaturgy is the art of trying to capture ‘the elusive if not ineffable spirit of
well-wrought dramatic texts’ (Cardullo 2005, 10) then this is where our aspirations lay
in this project. Through a hybrid process that integrated dramaturgy, performance
modelling and process drama, we generated an aesthetically shaped and layered
performance text that explored the key ideas of Shakespeare’s play, or at least those
that we thought were most accessible to these primary children; filial love, betrayal,
madness and power in this instance. This process of creating hybrid performance
texts that are responsive to the particularities of their context might reasonably be
termed ‘dramaturgic pedagogy’, thereby linking drama education to a rich and
evolving praxis in the professional theatre, whilst retaining its integrity as an
educative medium. While not suggesting this is the only way to approach
Shakespeare in disadvantaged communities, we do think that in some contexts
bold hybrid adaptations of classic works are a valid artistic choice.

Keywords: youth theatre; teaching Shakespeare; dramatic pedagogy

Notes
1. Stephen Armstrong, the Creative Producer of the Melbourne Malthouse Theatre.
2. All students’ names have been changed.

Notes on contributors
Dave Kelman is the Artistic Director of Western Edge Youth Arts in western Melbourne. He is a
director, playwright and drama educator who completed his doctorate on sociocultural
meaning in young people’s dramatised stories at the University of Melbourne in 2009.
Jane Rafe is a drama educator, writer and director working for Western Edge Youth Arts and her
own company, Dog Theatre. She is also a researcher for the University of Melbourne and
Deakin University.

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