`Who is Shakespeare? Do you know Shakespeare?" The children cup their chins, claw their lips and swing their legs beneath the table. Brigid Doherty has a difficult task ahead of her. Storytelling for children, as a ploy to get them to bed early is fine, but finding the fun in A Midsummer Night's Dream on a rare sunny afternoon in Dublin is quite a different story. Last Thursday Brigid is transforming the children's corner of the Central Library at the Ilac Centre into a magical woodland with fairies and dukes, spirits and carpenters, introducing Shakespeare in child-friendly terms as a writer of plays; "funny ones and bad ones and serious ones", in the course of last Thursday's "Stories from Shakespeare" storytelling session.
Finding the fun in Shakespeare is also the aim of this year's Speech and Drama Teachers' Annual Shakespeare Summer School which takes place in Ely House from tomorrow until August 24th. In the run-up to it, storytelling sessions in Donaghmede Library, Clontarf and the Ilac library in the city were organised for children.
The youngsters get A Midsummer Night's Dream with the Jackanory treatment at the Ilac library session: four deranged lovers reeking havoc with a magic flower whose juices turn the affections of a woman to a donkey's bottom.
Adults, meanwhile are likely to get a suitably entertaining interpretation of Shakespeare from Michael Bogdanov of the English Shakespeare Company in his lecture entitled "Alternative Shakespeare" at Ely House in Dublin tomorrow evening. The three-day literary indulgence will include workshops with both Bogdanov and Tom McGill, a lecturer in drama at Coleraine University of Ulster and free-lance theatre director, while Alan Stanford is in the line-up of performers.
Ely House, recently renovated for the BBC series The Ambassador starring Pauline Collins, provides the perfect setting for the summer school weekend. The idea is to give participants, teachers, actors, students and Shakespeare lovers an alternative view of the bard - aimed at making him more accessible to young people.
At last Thursday's library session with Brigid, the young children seem to have no difficulty with the plot. They well know what a jester is, but words such as "pension" need wishful simplification such as "money for life" - if only.
Discussing themes from A Midsummer Night's Dream, the half-hour story telling ends with musings on cupid and the relative merits of Boyzone and the Spice Girls. It looks like Shakespeare will live happily ever after.
Plays such as Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream are available in story versions adapted for children in Shakespeare's Animated Tales abridged by Leon Garfield, Heinemann Young Books. (available from local library.)
Brigid Doherty is a member of the Speech and Drama Association. For details on The Shakespeare Summer School tel: 01 849 0686 or 01 835 0680.
