Child's Play: The Young Actors Telling Very Grown Up Stories At Brisbane Festival

"What does depression feel like?" It's a tough question to answer, especially when asked by a child. Two companies featured at this year's Festival hope to connect young artists with adult audiences as they explore children's perspectives about issues that we often try to hide from them.

Queensland-based independent ensemble The Good Room's new work, I've Been Meaning To Ask You, is being created with an ensemble of children aged between nine and 13, and Irish company Dead Centre return to Brisbane with Hamnet, a play performed by an 11-year-old about Shakespeare's son, who died when he was a child. Not long after the death, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet and asked: "To be or not to be?"

Both works begin with questions. The Good Room work with anonymous answers while Dead Centre co-director and writer Ben Kidd describes their piece as "more of a philosophical idea than a play... A space to ask questions."

And there are many we could ask about Hamnet Shakespeare. All we really know is that he died at 11 when his dad was away in London trying to be famous. First performed in 2017, the show incorporates video performances, but the only live actor is Aran Murphy, who is the second young actor in the role.

Kidd says Hamnet is "one of us; he's too young to really understand what Hamlet all means, but so are most of his audience - ourselves included!" He reminds us that we say we understand Shakespeare "when, in reality, we really don't". 

Daniel Evans is the co-founder of The Good Room and describes their work as "ordinary people's experiences put centre stage" because "the people around us are just as interesting, if not more fascinating than any character in the canon".

The Good Room create theatre from hundreds of anonymous stories. They have developed a national reputation with their triptych of I Should Have Drunk More Champagne, about regret, I Want To Know What Love Is, about love, and I Just Came To Say Goodbye, about forgiveness. 

Regret, love, forgiveness; sounds like a typically Shakespearian story. Kidd describes how the Bard was "incredibly interested in grief - some of his most wonderful poetry is permeated with it. He was also a parent, and an absent one. And Hamnet is, in a way, an absent son. We were interested in the feeling of being one letter away from being remembered forever, and about how we can say goodbye."

The Good Room's anonymous stories range from single words to tomes and are collected on a website. They tried an anonymous phone line, but only five people used it; speaking was still too personal. Despite requests from marketing departments, the company refuses to track or identify contributors.

For the theatre-makers, anonymity offers a freedom to tell confronting and honest stories, which are expressed through verbatim reading or song, image, movement or, like in the love show, thousands of rose petals. But every re-telling is supported by respect for the contributor. Co-founder Amy Ingram, who was performing in the show, describes an audible gasp in a performance when an audience member recognised their own, devastating, story. They know that there is always a real and vulnerable person at the beginning of each narrative.

Complete truth is rare - we censor our extreme thoughts or put them into fictional characters - and this may be why The Good Room audiences experience so many "just like me" moments in the strangers' stories.

Evans thinks the connection is because of "the authenticity of a real person's story". Ingram finishes his thought: "When you see something on stage that is utterly true you can't fake that, and that connection is there ... It's truth and vulnerability and how they fit together."

With truth and vulnerability at the heart of everything they do, Ingram stresses how they "really want this work to be about young people speaking to adults".

"It's about giving them a sense of agency. They're the ones who are coming up with questions that they want answered and they're getting these anonymous answers back, so they have a real sense of ownership."

Evans says they start by "honouring the fact that when you're a young person, your opinions and experiences of the world are just as valid as someone older and, actually, just because you haven't completely matured yet, how you move through the world is as important as how we all do."

Kidd talks in a similar way about how adult audiences "really connect with the young person trying to make sense of the world in their own way"; age isn't always an indication of experience or understanding.

Evans says they've chosen this age group because it's an age group that are under-represented as an audience and that culturally "we don't know what to do with".

Ingram continues: "It's a really exciting age because they're forming their opinions based on school versus home life and on what they see and read; there's a lot of information coming at them. They're really aware that they don't know everything because that's people tell them - but they don't know everything yet. But they still have strong opinions.

An early development of the work, with children that Evans and Ingram have worked with since they were four or five, affirmed how empowering this work is to the young artists and how developing a safe and open space has enabled the young, and older, people to "trust us with some really tough questions".

There's also a lot of fun in the questions, like a young artist answering "How do I raise $35,000 quickly?" with "You can become a drug dealer or you can have a bake sale."

But it's the tough questions about issues like depression and death that's the uniting factor between young and older in both shows.

Ingram wasn't surprised by the "definite fascination with death and mortality that they're starting to grapple with" or that they are looking ahead for answers from their elders.

Perhaps when older people are free to be honest - even if it's hidden in the fiction or offered anonymously - they can admit that don't have all the answers.

Bush Moukarzel, who wrote and directed Hamnet with Kidd, says: "The biggest secret of the adult world is that we don't know what we're doing... We keep that secret from children. To mature is to learn, slowly and carefully, that nobody knows what they're doing.

Evans finds himself coming back to the importance of trust and of being vulnerable in our theatres and in life: "Vulnerability is how we get back to empathy. We do hurt and we don't have it all together and that's all right for anyone and everyone."