International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

remembered that the boundary between recreational drama and children’s theatre is ill
defined. Summer productions in London by the National Youth Theatre have been
intended for the personal development of the student participants, but they achieve
professional standards of production and in the past have included many actors marked
for future distinction, including Derek Jacobi, Helen Mirren and Daniel Day Lewis.

Drama in Children’s Literature

In both Britain and the USA children’s theatre effectively begins in the late nineteenth
century, first with Christmas pantomimes for a family audience, and dramatisations of
well-known children’s novels, and then at the turn of the century with Peter Pan and the
start of an original dramatic literature. Children’s novelists, however, have long been
aware of the broader place that drama has in children’s lives, creating plots and
episodes which reflect the varied experiences of drama set out above. A classic early
example can be seen in the ‘duke and king’ chapters of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn
(1884), notably the duke’s hilarious travesty of Hamlet’s soliloquy, To be or not to be
(chapter 21) which so arouses Huck Finn’s admiration.
Almost every level of child drama from the crudest ‘creative dramatics’ to professional
performances is reflected in modem stories. Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy (1964) has
a wonderful episode in which Harriet’s class, at the behest of an enthusiastic drama
teacher, improvises a dance for the Christmas pageant, with the children cast as items
in the festive dinner (including brown leotards for those who play the gravy). Harriet’s
teacher is the model of all that is worst in creative dramatics:

‘I want you to feel—to the very best of your endeavour—I want you to feel that one

morning you wake up as one of these vegetables, one of these dear vegetables,

nestling in the earth, warm in the heat and power and magic of growth, or striving

tall above the ground, pushing through, bit by bit in the miracle of birth, waiting

for that glorious moment when you will be...’ ‘Eaten’, Harriet whispered...

Fitzhugh 1964/1975:93

A school play, a revival of the Victorian melodrama Sweeney Todd, is the occasion of
Gillian Cross’s The Dark Behind the Curtain (1982), in which the old story summons up
the restless ghosts of maltreated Victorian children, while dramatics in more opulent
schools are important in the lives of Antonia Forest’s Marlow family, in, for example,
Autumn Term (1948) and The Cricket Term (1974). The Lake District teenagers of
Geoffrey Trease’s Black Banner series mount a production in Black Banner Players
(1952). Outside school, the hero of Jean Ure’s A Proper Little Nooryeff (1982), has to
come to terms with his embarrassing gift for ballet. Pamela Brown’s The Swish of the
Curtain (1941) achieved enormous popularity with its varied dramatic experiences of
pantomime, open-air performances, theatrical competitions and a visit to Stratford-
upon-Avon. Perhaps the most committed theatrical stories of all were those of Noel
Streatfeild, who had herself been an actress for many years before she became a
successful writer. Most famously in Ballet Shoes (1936), but also in such stories as
Curtain Up (1944) and The Painted Garden (1949), she depicted the lives and tribulations

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