Just great storytelling!
Fanfare, The Bell Shakespeare Magazine, 2008
Andy Griffiths has taken the well-known and well-loved characters from his Just! series – Just Tricking!, Just Stupid! and Just Shocking! – and let them loose on the Scottish heath. A school project goes awry, in typical Just! fashion, when Andy, Lisa and Danny get carried away preparing Macbeth’s first witch scene for their classmates. While experimenting with the truly foul potion they've concocted, the kids end up in another place and time, where people talk funny and everyone has Andy and Danny confused with a couple of blokes called Macbeth and Banquo.
“I’d always loved the play Macbeth and had studied it a lot when I was at school and at university,” says Griffiths. “And because my instincts are comedy instincts I thought it would be a great play to present because it was so dramatic and so awful – there’s so much tension in it and you can have a lot of fun with that, building that tension up and releasing it.”
Commissioned by Bell to write a play for kids, Griffiths set to work to tease out the parallels between Andy, Lisa and Danny, and the characters in Macbeth. Just as Macbeth finds himself committing heinous deeds to satisfy his ambition and impress his wife, so Andy will go to extraordinary lengths to win the heart of Lisa – as well as all the Wizz Fizz he can eat.
After three years of working on the script with his wife, Jill Griffiths, the play was workshopped by Bell under the direction of Wayne Harrison. “We got six actors together and a garden gnome, and we spent a week evolving the text and shaping it,” says Harrison.
For Andy and Jill Griffiths, it was a revelatory experience. “We were just astonished every day,” says Andy. “We’d take notes and go home and rewrite whole sections of the play according to what the actors were doing and to Wayne’s direction.”
Just Macbeth! will be Bell’s first show commissioned and performed especially for children. While the author of books with titles like The Day My Bum Went Psycho might not appear to share much with the greatest writer in the English language, Andy Griffiths and the Bard may actually have quite a bit in common. At least Bell’s Associate Director, Marion Potts, and producer Gill Perkins, seemed to think so.
“They said they’d been following my career with interest and had noticed that I had the ability to polarise audiences, which they said was very like what Shakespeare did in his day,” said Griffiths. “I’ll never forget that because it’s a great way to get someone’s attention!”
According to Wayne Harrison, the transition from page to stage for Andy, Lisa and Danny is quite a natural one, as Griffiths’ books actually evolved from the former schoolteacher’s extraordinary talent for live storytelling.
“Andy does a version of stand-up comedy where he tells them stories,” says Harrison. “His entertainment of children was so impressive that people said he should write it down, but in the first instance his is live entertainment.”
Griffiths thinks Macbeth can speak as much to kids as it does to adults. “It has a lot of the elements I use when I’m entertaining children – a character who does something beyond the pale then suffers enormous guilt,” he explains. “And then there are the ghosts, witches, and a cauldron full of really horrible ingredients… You’ve got it all in one incredible package.”
While Just Macbeth! Explores the complex moral themes of Shakespeare’s original, it also introduces a young audience to Shakespearean language. When the three kids first find themselves being addressed in Elizabethan English, they are confused and have to spend some time working out what’s going on – a journey the kids in the audience will share. By the end of the play, Andy and Lisa and Danny are rattling off iambic pentameter like naturals.
“Hopefully it will demystify Shakespeare a bit for kids,” says Harrison. “In Australian culture, there can be a barrier that grows between Shakespeare and kids, but using a bridge like Andy to approach the world of the language of Shakespeare I think is a very noble aim.”
Along the way there is plenty of slapstick, as well as a peppering of in-jokes sure to delight those kids who have already read Griffiths’ books, all of it designed to engage young people with theatre, and get them interested in Shakespeare.
“When you strip a lot of contemporary practice away from Shakespeare, what is left is a great storyteller who knew how to grip an audience with these tales he had to tell,” says Harrison. “It strikes me that Andy is that way as well – he tells the sort of stories that kids want to listen to.”
Visit the Just Macbeth! page to find out more