Children’s Theatre Partnership's Edward Snape: ‘Theatre can be transformative. Every child deserves that opportunity’

Snape has had plenty of highlights in his career: producing the Olivier award-winning The 39 Steps, The Ladykillers and Home, I’m Darling. But few give him more pleasure than the performance of The Jungle Book in a Midlands theatre. He recalls: “There was a moment of silence and one of the children called out: ‘You are a very bad tiger!’ It was incredibly funny, but it was also more than that. That young audience who get so much entertainment delivered to them through screens realised that experience doesn’t have to be passive and in the theatre it isn’t.”

This month brings the Children’s Theatre Partnership potentially its greatest coup. Animal Farm, adapted and directed by Robert Icke, who won an Olivier for Oresteia and received rave reviews for his Hamlet with Andrew Scott, will open at the Birmingham Rep before heading across the country on a 28-date tour. The production comes with design by Bunny Christie and puppetry by Toby Olié, who played the hind legs and head of Joey in War Horse, and who was associate puppet director on the show’s West End run.

Snape says that a production on such a scale – with over a dozen actors in the cast – is only feasible because “the Arts Council has been good to the Children’s Theatre Partnership and seen the value of what we do. We went from project funding to project funding and eventually we received three years of funding. That stability gave us the confidence to develop Animal Farm and also weather the pandemic.”

While Icke has previous form with Orwell – his production of 1984 was much admired, toured the UK and went to the West End and Broadway – he is currently more likely to be found directing in major European capitals than in the UK. But he has a relationship with Snape that grew out of Fiery Angel backing the West End transfer of Icke’s production Mary Stuart from the Almeida.

Snape’s roster of commercial productions has always been broad, and he believes that sometimes projects are worth doing even if they are not obvious money spinners. Particularly if children are the beneficiaries: “You never know, maybe Animal Farm will become commercial, further down the road. But for that to happen we need the funding to support it in the first place, which is where working with theatres and Children’s Theatre Partnership comes in.”

From the outset, Snape wanted the Children’s Theatre Partnership to be bold in marrying top notch creatives with children’s audiences. “There has always been an ambition in what we set out to do,” the producer says. He argues that young audiences not only deserve top talent and ambitious shows, but they also deserve work of scale. That is hard to do commercially “because the only way that schools will come is if the ticket prices are affordable.”

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Snape admires commercial shows such as Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in the West End and says that they do a great deal to help grow family audiences for theatre, “but you only have to look at how much the tickets cost for some of these shows, and we are quite frankly in danger of becoming far too expensive for many people to afford. It is a real concern for theatre.”

It’s definitely too much of a stretch for many schools, who often found organising school trips tricky even before the pandemic. “We are all going to have to do a lot more work to encourage schools to go to the theatre. A member of my family teaches in a primary school, so I know what a Herculean task it is for schools to organise a theatre trip,” Snape says.

"We need to ensure that all schools can afford theatre and every child in the country gets to see it"

“There is the health and safety aspect – the parent has to sign off. Someone has the coach to book and then the school has to be able to justify the expense too. If it’s not a private school, that can be a real barrier. It’s why one of my ambitions is to get a commercial sponsor behind the Children’s Theatre Partnership so it’s not so difficult for schools to come. We keep hearing about levelling up; one way to do that is to ensure that all schools can afford theatre and every child in the country gets to see it. We know just how transforming it can be. Every child deserves that opportunity.”

Snape is not just proud of the Children’s Theatre Partnership’s shows, but all the educational activity – developed with Blackpool Grand Theatre and its groundbreaking story-led resilience programme for young people – which support the productions and which adds value for hard-pressed teachers.

“They get support. This all costs money, but its money worth spending. Producing theatre isn’t for the faint-hearted, particularly not at the moment when there is so much uncertainty. But we know there is an audience. We just have to persuade them to come.”

Animal Farm is touring the UK from 22 January to 28 May, 2022; childrenstheatrepartnership.co.uk