|
|
 |
| |
A scene from We’re Going on a Bear Hunt |
Comedy, beat poetry and bear hunts
As his tenure as Children’s Laureate ends, Michael Rosen talks to Simon Wroe about a West End adaptation of his most famous book
POETS, the writer GK Chesterton observed, were “mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese”.
Certainly, the medium has a sombre and pensive majority; but Michael Rosen is not one of them.
The laughter during a recent poetry reading for 400 primary schoolchildren, held at Haverstock School, went through uproarious and verged, at times, on the hysterical. One little girl laughed so hard she fell off her chair and had to be helped up by a teacher. If Rosen has not written a poem about cheese yet, it is only a matter of time.
It is easy to make assumptions when you look at Rosen, whose two-year tenure as Children’s Laureate ends next month. The first is that children are an easy audience. In fact, the opposite holds true: children are the most candid of all critics.
It has taken Rosen, a lean 63-year-old with a toothsome grin, four decades and more than 140 children’s books to perfect his brand of “active storytelling”, a wide-eyed mixture of beat poetry, audience participation and stand-up comedy. Allen Ginsberg, John Hegley, Eddie Izzard and Rolf Harris are all cited as influences.
“To start with it was heap scary, I can tell you,” he says. “The children have to have a sense that the story is being made both for them and with them. There mustn’t be a sense that the story is already made before you get there.
“It’s great when you do a show and you’re more surprised than the children.”
This implied anarchy is encouraged for the theatrical version of We’re Going On a Bear Hunt, Rosen’s most famous book, which receives its West End premiere in July. The audience are asked to invent the bears to be hunted while the actors fly through forests of paper and simulate streams by wading through buckets of wet soil.
The second assumption is that Rosen, so natural and good-humoured in delivery, could be worried about anything. But as a former contributor to Socialist Worker and one-time candidate for the Respect Party (in 2004), the laureateship has opened Rosen’s eyes to endemic failures in children’s education across the country.
“Although the government keeps talking about literacy, they don’t seem to be interested in whether children read books or not. They think they can have literacy without literature. This is fatal. The school timetable is filled up with kids doing worksheets: a bit of passage, a question. That isn’t full, deep reading. It’s a complete and utter misreading of how the human mind works,” he says.
“In many places the kids don’t see books, the library is tatty or closed, there’s no relationship with the local library, or if there is they say it’s only interesting for the top 5 per cent in the school and they let the others go hang. It ends up being a form of discrimination. The reading of books, widely and often, has to be central to the curriculum. It’s through books that we get hold of complex and abstract ideas.”
Among his achievements as Children’s Laureate – The Roald Dahl Funny Prize for the funniest books of the year, a British Library exhibition about the history of children’s poetry, and a Poetry Youtube for Kids to be launched in the autumn – Rosen’s campaign for literacy may be his epitaph.
In this respect he follows after his father, Harold Rosen, a famous educationalist and voice of the Left in post-war Britain.
Both Rosen’s parents were teachers and Jewish East Enders; he describes his childhood, in the suburb of Pinner, as “fantastic… there was always the idea that you could be anything, do anything, and never think there was a glass ceiling or that you’d reached the end of the road.”
He started writing about his childhood while he was still a child, about sharing a room with his brother or the things his father would say.
“I got interested in the idea that you can make fables out of your own life,” he says. “It used to drive my parents round the bend because they weren’t sure whether my feet were in the real or the unreal.”
Rosen is the father of five children, one of whom, his son Eddie, died of septicaemia in 1999, at the age of 18. He now lives in Dalston with his third wife, the radio producer Emma Williams.
A professor at Birkbeck, he has also recently drawn up an MA children’s literature, due to start in 2010. One thing he will not be doing, however, is performing in the new version of his play.
“They haven’t booked me. This is the kind of disappointment we have to live with. I was hoping for a part, maybe as the bear, but I didn’t get the call.”
•
|
|
|
Your comments:
The Lenkiewicz exhibition is stunning from the remarkable St Eustace sculpture to the drawings featuring unicorns, tigers and Elvis! The skeletons and skulls were my particular favourite along with the octopus drowning the Titanic. The surroundings are fabulous; the Pite architecture lends itself so well to the mood. I admit I have a particular fondness for
the building having worked there for 26 years.
J. Trend-Hill
|
|
|
|
