‘It's a high-octane, high-stakes spy caper,’ explains Emma Clark, one half, along with PJ Stanley, of the theatre-making duo Emma +PJ, about their new show for 7- to 11-year-olds, The Shivers. Together, the American and British theatre-making team create shows that aren't easy to slot into boxes, original, experimental theatre with a dash of magic.
Created via workshops with local children and teachers, The Shivers was developed with the New Diorama, the powerhouse fringe theatre in the London Borough of Camden that's become something of an incubator for emerging theatre talent. The Shivers follows its young protagonist into ‘a crazy world where misinformation is causing glitches and causing our senses to go awry,’ explains Clark. ‘They get thrust into a mission to save the world.’
The Shivers is quite technologically complex for a show designed to tour school halls, utilising live video feeds and green screen technology, explains Stanley, using things ‘their generation has grown up, but in ways that maybe they haven't seen before, especially in a school environment.’
Style and substance
The show is styled like a vintage 1970s spy thriller, and while they know most of their audience are unlikely to have watched many Roger Moore movies, says Stanley, ‘there's something quite fun about these trappings of genre.’
Clark and Stanley come from opposite sides of the Atlantic. She is from California, and he is from Portsmouth, though the pair met in London, when they were both on the MA in Advanced Theatre Practice programme at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. They both have political science backgrounds and had an interest in making work which Clark calls ‘quietly political,’ which they think drew them together. They started collaborating after they graduated and their first show, Atlantic – ‘an apocalyptic clown romance’ – had a short run at the Vault Festival in 2020, but its future life was curtailed by the pandemic.
Their second show, Ghosts of the Near Future, was a sell-out success at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe. Described by them as a mixture of The Prestige and Fallout, it was called a ‘frequently beautiful and bewildering attempt to figure out our feelings about extinction events,’ by critic Fergus Morgan in his review for The Stage. Developed as part of the Barbican's Open Lab programme, it had a short run at the Barbican in London late last year.
The duo's evolution
Clark and Stanley aren't new to making work for young people. They were lead artists on a programme called Yardlings at the Yard Theatre in Hackney, which saw them devising a series of after-school classes for three schools in the local area. This scheme introduced them to the 7-to-11 age group, for whom they particularly enjoy making work. ‘We fell in love with that age group because they're still so imaginative and so full of energy,’ says Stanley. It's also quite a spectrum in terms of how the children respond to the work. ‘The non-human characters play well with the slightly younger kids, whereas the older kids track the narrative a bit more and respond to the verbal material,’ Clark says.
When you're making work for this age group, adds Clark, there's an awareness that for some of the children this will be their first experience of theatre. or exposure to the performing arts. ‘The teachers have been saying how much they've been feeling the cutbacks in art spending and arts provision,’ she says. ‘A lot of the kids we're working with, live really near central London and yet they don't have access to what's on their doorstep at all.’
This inspired them to be even more ambitious with the show, she says, and to push themselves and the work further. While there is a degree of unpredictability in making work for schools, she was. they didn't want that to hold them back or constrain them. ‘We didn't take it for granted that we couldn't have any technology, or we couldn't have complex design. We're hoping to give them a bang for their buck, metaphorically.’
Direct feedback
Workshopping the show with the children was an illuminating experience. ‘They asked for lights and smoke and lasers and for there to be 40 people on stage,’ laughs Stanley. They were aware of the need to manage expectations, but at the same time this pushed them to be bolder in what they set out to do. Could they really have a full live-camera setup and 14 costume changes in a school show? ‘Our answer is always yes, and then we figure it out,’ says Stanley, ‘because we were trying to give young people a chocolate box of ideas about what things can be possible on stage.’
The creative process has been an enjoyable one and they'd be keen to make more work for this age group in the future. ‘We've laughed more in this R&D than I can remember,’ says Stanley. ‘It's been fun, but we also take the responsibility of making work for young people very seriously because we're aware that this may be the only engagements with theatre some young people get and that it can be quite formative.’