Carol-Ann Duffy's story of happy endings recovered has been transformed into a two-night spectacular to be played against the Edinburgh skyline, writes DAVID ROBINSON
IT'S storytime. Night is falling over the city and Jub, the girl who has collected all the bedtime stories' happy endings – golden words hanging like leaves in the forest she lives in – climbs up to near the top of a tree and scatters them to the fou
r winds. Every night she does this, and every night the happy endings find their way into the stories, and into those equally golden moments before the city's children close their eyes to sleep.
Carol Ann Duffy's The Lost Happy Endings – which is brought to full, musical life in a twilight promenade performance at Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden at twilight on Thursday and Friday – imagines what would happen if Jub's mission failed. If there was a witch, say, hiding in the woods ready to snatch those happy endings away.
Edinburgh composer Dee Isaacs has been working on this project since last summer. Tomorrow night, when it all comes together, there'll be lamps in the garden's trees, a small cart full of gypsy musicians being pulled along its paths, 70 seven and eight-year-olds playing woodland animals and crows or singing in the chorus and – if you don't want to read the happy ending, look away now – a wicked witch burnt on a stage on the lawn.
The two-night performance, which costs £30,000 to stage, has involved Isaacs working with 100 children at two state primary schools in Edinburgh and 25 of the undergraduates on the music course she teaches at Edinburgh university. The main production team is, however, resolutely international: director Roxana Pope is a British-Iranian freelance theatre and film director, Iulian Furtuna trained in Romania and in Paris with Marcel Marceau, dancer Antje Schur is from East Germany and Sergey Jakovsky, the lighting designer, is Russian.
Isaacs and Pope have been working together for the last eight years, after they met while working on a similar project in Georgia. Before then, she had studied music at Edinburgh University under Professor Michael Osborne, on a course he'd set up to make music more widely accessible. Working with the Botanics on music theatre projects that trained her own students and opened children's ears to the possibilities of music seemed the next logical step.
"The Botanic Garden is one of the most magical places in Edinburgh," says Isaacs. "It's a natural set. Everything's already there. The change in the light between 6:30pm and 8:15pm is wonderful too, and dusk is the most perfect time for storytelling."
She started the project at its ending, writing the music for the final song based on a passage about listening to the music of the city in Jon McGregor's novel If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. The decision to have her 100-strong team perform that on the lawns of Inverleith House, with the cityscape behind them, was an obvious one, but the process of getting to the finale was a complex logistical challenge.
She then created musical set-pieces that her students could work on with the children, both in their individual classes and together as a group. Additions had to be made to Duffy's text to give more background to Jub, the main character; another central character, the Balloon Man had to be invented, and the chorus had to be provided with more things to do. Finally, the rehearsals, and the tricky matter of keeping 70 children focused on the music rather than wandering off to look at the ducks or hide in the trees.
Until last week the children – from Edinburgh's Craigroyston and Victoria primary schools – hadn't performed en masse and had only been rehearsing in the daylight. "It's when they get into the gardens and when they're properly lit that they see the full scale of what they're doing," says Isaacs.
A couple of years ago, Isaacs worked on a similar project in the Royal Botanic Garden, with children in their last couple of years at primary school. This week's performance will be with much younger children. Isn't it going to be a lot harder?
"It's a huge challenge, but they always rise to it," she says. "When you get them in the gardens, they're very excited; they're with real musicians playing real instruments, everything from recorder to cello and violin; they'll be singing some of the words they have helped me come up with, acting and dressing up as characters they've decided to be. It's important to me that I work with children who aren't so privileged that they routinely have these kind of experiences. These children haven't, and they love it.
"The feedback we get is always amazing. Some of the parents might never have been into the Botanics at all, and they see what a wonderful place it is. Then they also see their children, whom they might never expected to sing in public, doing just that, and they can't help but be moved. Last time we did something like this, one of the headteachers wrote to say not only how affected he had been by the performance but how incredible it had been to see one child who found it difficult to focus in class singing out loud and strong and concentrating. If this just works for one child, the whole thing will have been worthwhile, but there's more to it than that: it's a professional production in its own right that anyone will enjoy."
• The Lost Happy Endings is at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, 6-7 March at 6:30pm. Tickets are £5 (under-12s free) and available in advance from the Botanics Shop at East Gate (cash only), 0131-248 2961.
