For 25 years the London Symphony Orchestra has used classical music to educate and inspire with its LSO Discovery programme. For ‘Play On Shakespeare’ they have teamed up with the Barbican for a mixture of child friendly, pantomime-like performances of Shakespeare and orchestral music inspired from those very same passages. The aim is to educate children about not only the content of Shakespeare’s plays but also how the emotions and themes of his works translate into music. Profokiev’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’, for example, is used in combination with the performances to emphasise both the romance of the balcony scene and the violence and blood-thirst of the warring Montagues and Capulets.

The performance is preceded by a whole morning of educational activities. A Barbican employee in the foyer cajoles initially reserved children into an authentically Shakespearean sing-along. On the lower levels, children sit with their parents, examining excerpts and pictures. The intercom informs the waiting families that they must take their seats. Parental stress trickles out of their otherwise composed expressions as they juggle excitable children, tickets and sizeable amounts of concessions. After 10 minutes of settling a man takes the stage and yells at the tuning LSO to shut up.

The concept of the event is this: Shakespeare has broken his quill, he’s run out of ideas and he’s in a stinker of a mood. Puck lends his impish hand to try and help, enlisting both the LSO and the children to help come up with ideas for the frustrated bard. There is a good mix of encouraged participation (for the Tempest the kids are asked to give their best impressions of thunder, rain and wind) and performance. You do not spy one crossed pair of arms or sulky, pouting face.

There’s a fairly constant chatter but it’s mostly children asking their parents about what they are seeing. They seem genuinely interested throughout. There is a mimed medley of plays to close out the hour which is perhaps a tad too abstract for the children to grasp but its simplistic, five second summaries of Othello and King Lear elicits a few chuckles from the parents.

Could some of the performances been subtler? Of course. Could some of the amazing classical pieces been given a little bit longer? Most certainly. These quibbles do not matter .This was a success through and through. I heard a young boy genuinely whoop for Mendelssohn and saw wide eyed rapture for Sibelius’ “The Storm” from children still in their first decade. If you’re a parent hoping to get your young child into Shakespeare I don’t know what more you could want.

Event description on Barbican website: http://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event-detail.asp?ID=17681