"The young alive ones in the new mould, especially the comedians, are inventive."*

Many, many years ago when I was merely a wee nipper, I never expected that just a few months shy of my 35^th birthday, I’d be working in Ukraine, getting paid decent money to try and corral 13 little monsters every day for 4 weeks and force them to put on a performance in a theatre, all the while attempting to maintain my sanity and refrain from questioning how my life came to this.

My acting exploits over the last 9 or so months have already been documented. I’ve also dabbled in various directorial roles with children over the years, though I’m not sure if it’s ever been by choice. When I decided to become an English teacher, I never expected that I would be Shanghaied into trying to mold little hooligans into actors.

My first foray into directing came whilst teaching in Spain, where I worked with 12 little girls in a play called ‘The Day of the Robots’. Probably not the most logical and appealing play for a group of girls, but the guy who ran the theatre club at the school had written it and insisted I put it on. So I duly obliged, and spent 2 hours every Friday evening over a span of 10 weeks ‘rehearsing’ and making costumes made out of cardboard boxes and tin foil, trying to choreograph dance scenes to the tune of ‘we will rock you’ (but changing ‘rock’ into ‘control’ as the plot involved robots trying to control the world) and Kraftwerk’s The Robots. On the evening of the performance, in a proper theatre and all, the girls all froze in terror and put on a horrific show. I was mortified and vowed never to do this again.

At summer schools, however, this kind of thing is de rigueur. In Canterbury, we were all forced to put on a play or skit of some sort with our students. With a motivated, high-level group of teenagers, this was an absolute treat: let their creative juices flow and they would come up with some stellar ideas. With the younger ones, or even worse, the highly unmotivated Spanish and Italian teenagers, who despite having studied English for 8 years were still only at an elementary level, it was a real battle, and the aim was to keep things as simple as possible, but while also including enough of a ‘language element’ to satisfy management.

I met with mixed success. Any kind of Jerry Springer format is usually fun and offers tremendous potential for creative ideas. Otherwise, my other couple of standby ideas were the police line-up, where you had 1 victim and 1 interrogating officer, with the remaining students in a line-up, each with a number. This is great for low-level students to practice the past continuous (what were you doing at 10pm last night? I was washing my hair in tequila). It’s a pretty repetitive skit, but easily achievable and manageable. The funny twist would be thus: the number 6, say, would be missing from the lineup. After the victim had gone through and listened to everyone’s alibi, it was up to him to then choose who he thought was the suspect. But just as he was about to decide, out came a bound and gagged suspect with a crumpled up number 6 shoved in his mouth. As the interrogating officer removed the ropes and tape, suspect number 6 would then point to the so-called ‘victim’ shouting, ‘it was him, it was him!’ Ha ha…

My other favourite, which I was introduced to by another teacher and acted in myself (as well as MCing the talent show) in the summer of 2005 in Uxbridge, is one I continually come back to since it’s always a crowd pleaser. I described it in the Layman’s Guide last August, but here’s another brief summary: there are shop assistants, and some shoppers. It starts off with general shop chit-chat: ‘have you got any potatoes? what, no potatoes, what kind of shop is this?’ This dialogue goes on for a minute or two. Suddenly, robbers burst into the shop, demanding everyone’s money. There are screams and cries of ‘help! help!’. Then the police charge in – ‘you’re under arrest, put your hands up!’ – but all-hell breaks loose and everyone ends up dead. From backstage, the director comes out to say ‘cut, cut! that was terrible, absolutely terrible! I want you to do it again, but this time make it faster, it was too slow.’ You can see where this one is going – the actors now overly exaggerate everything, doing the next scene in super-slow motion. After this, you can have faster versions, funnier, sadder, more dramatic, more musical, mafia-style…the variations are endless. In Austria, a group of teenagers insisted on a gay version. I tried to argue them out of it, but then they refused to do it altogether, so I had little choice. Keep in mind that this was a country where Jorg Haider had considerable popular support for a number of years.

Spoiler alert!

If you haven’t had the pleasure of seeing this performed, you may want to avoid reading any further as I’m going to give away the ending, on the off-chance that you’ve failed to guess it. After the final take, the director emerges to say ‘that was splendid, wonderful, well done, everybody!’ As the actors embrace and high-five one another, the director turns to the cameraman, usually me, and asks ‘cameraman, did you get that?’ I stumble out from the shadows and give an initial thumbs-up, only to break down and cry ‘oh no, I’m so terribly sorry, my camera isn’t working!’ And then all of the actors rush towards me and beat me into a bloody pulp. Ha ha…

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve cajoled unsuspecting students into performing this one, but it has to be at least 7 or 8. Last summer in Wokingham, we weren’t required to do drama with the kids, but seeing as there was a talent show, I decided I’d attempt to try my old standby with a group of 7-10 year old French, Italian and Spanish brats.

To the present day

This past Friday, my little protégés performed the shop scene, as well as Pandora’s Box – featuring, Zeus, Aphrodite, Apollo et al - to a decent-sized crowd of around 60 people – family, friends and colleagues from the school – in an intimate wee theatre.

The real problem with trying to get little ones to act is that on the day of the show, what transpires can be utterly unpredictable. As I learned with ‘The Day of the Robots’, the days leading up to the show can have great rehearsals, but there’s no telling what will happen when nerves kick in and all of these poor little whippersnappers forget their words, retreat to the back of the stage and are seized with stage fright.

The other dilemma is, more with teenagers, you may be in for a not-so-pleasant, though highly amusing surprise. With a rowdy, but enjoyable and charismatic group of 15-16 year olds in Canterbury doing a Jerry Springer scene, the fight scene got completely out of hand and suddenly the Spanish and Italians were smashing chairs into each other’s backs WWE style. And then there was the Cypriot, who I believe was drunk, who started swearing ‘fuck you, Springer, you fucking malaka!’ as he pole-axed whoever was unfortunate enough to have been cast as Mr Springer.

Also in Canterbury, in the police line-up scene at the end, the victim, a 13 year old Spanish boy, yelled ‘oh fuck!’ into the microphone and then ran off stage.

And in last summer’s Wokingham shop scene fiasco, where all of my little ones decided last minute that they didn’t want to perform, only for me to beg and plead with them into doing it, in return offering to humiliate myself in some undisclosed fashion – yes, in effect I had to bribe the little shits - the adorable little Spanish boy cast in the director’s role was so pissed off by the end, that he tore the script up into a thousand little pieces and muttered to me ‘it is shit, Danny, it is shit’ before throwing the pieces into the air and storming off the stage, while I just stood there looking like a gormless lemon.

I recounted this episode, along with all of the other weird and wacky goings-on of summer school, here.

Keep in mind here, that with some of these shows, there are around 100-150 students, with loads of teachers, group leaders and management staff watching. Half the kids are probably trying to impress their friends.

Why do I even bother, you ask? I have no idea.

This past Friday was of significantly more importance, because it was the first time the school had actually offered a 4-week, daily drama course (these things aren’t cheap, either), and so I felt like there was a bit more pressure involved.

Now, I’ve had some rough teaching moments in my time. Spain was a hellish nightmare with the children and teenagers I taught, with the ‘highlight’ being one foul-mouthed prick saying ‘I fuck your mother’s milk’, which is a particularly incendiary insult in Spain, when uttered in Spanish of course. My time teaching in American high school in spring 2010 was a nightmare, but not because of the students, but because of my mentor (the teacher I was working with), a wretched, sadistic bitch who delighted in making my life a misery. What was so bad about that stretch was the duration: over 3 months.

A mere 4 weeks pale in comparison, but let me tell you, it was far from easy. Of the 13 kids I was entrusted with, half of them were well-behaved and wanted to be there. Another 2 or 3 were just kids being kids, and were tricky to control, but nothing beyond unmanageable. The remaining 4 were nightmares. They were the youngest ones, 7 or 8, and with very little English. Every class was a running battle to prevent them from clobbering each other, stabbing each other with pens, kicking, chasing, punching, shouting, screaming, listening…they were absolute holy terrors. One little boy I referred to as the ‘human octopus’ because he couldn’t sit still and would constantly run around the room, arms and legs flailing, flopping onto the floor, bouncing right back up, whacking the others with his out-of-control limbs. Another little boy would never shut up, whether it was chirping bird sounds, or farting noises, oinking pigs, loud yelps, all the while trying to punch anyone who came near him. There was another little shit who never stopped running around the room and acted like he was a hit-and-run driver, trying to smack as many people as he could without breaking stride or getting caught. You can imagine how much fun it was trying to control these hoodlums and getting everyone to rehearse and listen to me. I had to repeatedly talk to parents about their kids’ behaviour, only to be told the same damn thing ‘oh, this is how they are at home and at school, we can’t do anything about it. Feel free to hit them or use force.’ I’m no expert in child-rearing, but I can’t help but say that has got to be the parents’ fault. The blame lies entirely with them, does it not?

(Yet another reason I don’t want kids: what if it isn’t the parents’ fault, it’s all genetic, and I get stuck with a lemon that I can’t do anything about?)

Even at the best of times, I’m not a great sleeper, especially in the summer when it gets so hot and clammy. I was a nervous wreck these past few weeks. Not only did I dread going into school each morning, but I would lie awake most of the night frozen in terror, wondering if I would be able to pull this off.

Laugh all you like, but when push comes to shove, I do take this shit seriously, and I was highly ambitious with what I wanted them to do. I’d lie in bed concocting new hare-brained schemes, ideas, dances, whatever, that I would attempt to teach the following day. It was usually in vain, as I’d spend the majority of the 2 hour period in crowd-control mode. Things got so bad that I was given a classroom assistant to help.

(and how’s this for a sign of how bad it could have been: the assistant told me that in comparison to other, regular classes she’d seen at the school, this was nothing. That, and the fact that it is summer after all, did make me feel a bit better.)

In the days leading up to Friday’s performance, I was in a state of sheer panic. I knew other teachers would be watching, as well as management and other staff, and there was more than just professional pride on the line here. (or perhaps not, I’m probably exaggerating.) Going into Friday, we had not managed to put in one decent rehearsal and half the kids still didn’t know their lines. The persistent yelper and oinker didn’t know any of his. On top of that, the main star of the show – Pandora herself - had gone on holiday the weekend before and no one knew if she was even going to turn up on the day! I envisaged myself going out there in a little purple dress to play her role.

We had two shows to perform: the primary one was Pandora’s Box (hence me potentially having to squeeze into a purple dress), the secondary was the infamous shop scene.

Well, what can I say? The kids somehow managed to pull it off. Okay, I can be hyper-critical here and nitpick: they were a bit shy and quiet with their lines, they flubbed a few, they were too far back on the stage, the overly-practiced and elaborately choreographed miming scenes were muffled and too low-key, it was rushed, the same little culprits were still trying to strangle each other backstage, the human octopus whacked and bodyslammed everyone during the shoot-out in the shop, the yelper and oinker didn’t know his lines and so stood at the back of the stage where I had to whisper them to him…but considering how horrendous our rehearsals had been, it was nothing short of a minor miracle that the kids performed with such aplomb. I was really impressed by their Greek gods and goddesses’ costumes, with the human octopus playing Poseidon and the hyperactive runner as Hermes coming up with brilliant costumes. Everyone looked the part. The parents were absolutely delighted and the reviews were great. Hell, we even got a standing ovation. At this point, please refrain from any cynicism - they were just being polite, they had to applaud their children for self-esteem reasons, etc – and allow me to exult in glory. It was a very trying and exhausting 4 weeks.

Thank goodness it’s over.

Will I do this again? I’m not sure if I can, but if I were a betting man, I’d say yes.

And I do like a good bet.

*Elia Kazan