GOOD MORNING CHILDREN

Good Morning Children was a Youth Theatre play produced in 1988, based on the school day stories told by older people who came to the newly opened Reminiscence Centre to participate in a regular reminiscence group. Topics included corporal punishment, teachers’ pets, humiliation of poor children, hiding in outdoor toilets to escape lessons, playing truant, stealing from the local sweet shop…

About 20 children, aged 10 to 14, were drawn from local schools and met in the Reminiscence Centre on Saturday mornings. In the first couple of sessions the young people heard stories from the reminiscence group about what had happened inside the classroom and out. These stories were explored in small groups through improvisation and then played back to the whole Youth Theatre group.

All the action was performed in front of a backcloth painted by the group based on an original photograph supplied by one of the older people, but with the children’s own faces painted by each one of them. At the performance, the older people read some of their own stories from the book of school days memories published to mark the event, and so they were fully recognised as part of the creative team.