On the ground floor of a busy Belfast shopping centre an unobtrusive black door bears the word Cahoots. Go through it and you’ll stumble into a world of wonder and imagination, a maze of workshops and rehearsal spaces, costume and props stores and a fully equipped theatre that, between August and the end of this year, will stage four new pieces of work for young audiences.
A gallery of photographs and posters on the corridor walls offers a nostalgic trip into the 23-year back catalogue of Cahoots theatre company. Under the boundless imagination of its artistic director and cofounder, Paul McEneaney, the company has produced a vast canon of engaging, visually stunning work for children and families.
They don’t come much more spectacular than The Vanishing Elephant, conceived by McEneaney and written by the distinguished children’s playwright Charles Way. Recently the company has been travelling the east coast of the United States, making a wonderfully lifelike elephant created by the puppeteer Helen Foan disappear in front of 10,000 wide-eyed audience members.
At the start of June it will play the prestigious Southbank Centre, in London, and then transfer to the magnificent Buxton Opera House in Derbyshire, the Oxford Playhouse and, in Coventry, the Belgrade Theatre.
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The show had an inauspicious start. During lockdown the company lost a number of its producing partners and the whole enterprise was in danger of falling apart. Cahoots was at a crossroads. But its key partner, the New Victory Theater in New York, remained on board. As a result rehearsals took place in Belfast, the show was shipped across the Atlantic and, in October 2023, it opened on a stage that could accommodate the full scale of its spectacle. A stressful, back-to-front process proved a blessing in disguise.
A few days into its opening run, The New York Times hailed the show as its Critic’s Pick, a rare accolade for children’s theatre. Suddenly, tickets were in huge demand and venues from across the States were queuing up to see it. In the blink of an eye the company’s profile went off the scale.
“It was a game changer,” McEneaney says. “We’re just back from playing a circuit that, a few years ago, we could never have dreamed of. We’ve been playing 3,500-seat venues – and filling them. It was a whole new experience and has opened doors for us right across the country.”
The company is currently juggling two big new shows: The Sorceror’s Apprentice, in a partnership with the New Victory Theatre and Buxton Opera House, and The Musicians of Bremen Live!, based on the Grimm Brothers’ folk tale, a co-production with the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California, where some 2,500 people attended its February premiere.
McEneaney has come a long way since his childhood in Armagh, when, as a boy magician, his parents drove him around the country to perform at children’s birthday parties.
“Even back then I loved that spark you feel when an audience is engaged in a story or a trick or a piece of music or a spoken word,” he says. “That energy still captivates me. It’s the real magic trick. I wish I could bottle the gasp, followed by the moment of silence, when an audience is totally engaged.”
His first commission came from Young at Art, which invited him to create something for the 2002 Belfast Children’s Festival. The piece was called Buster. McEneaney wrote and performed in it. It was a sign of things to come, the story of a sad old man and a little puppet that came alive under the spell of midnight magic. It was subsequently invited to the Edinburgh International Children’s Festival and several other high-profile festivals.
Over the years audiences have come to expect from Cahoots work that is visually inventive, tinged with magic and illusion, and driven by a compelling narrative. McEneaney admits he sets out to make work that, as an adult, he would like to see, without changing the perspective merely because the primary target audience is young people.
“Work for young audiences is different in the way that it is funded and perceived within our industry,” he says. “One of the problems is that it has been viewed as an entry-level sport. I can’t tell you how much that frustrates me. Children deserve the best actors, writers, designers, composers. It requires venues to open up their main spaces to children’s theatre much more often and for there to be parity of funding with other work. This work is an integral part of the sector, not put into a separate box from the rest.
“I felt it was an injustice that young people couldn’t get to see our work except at Christmas. Young audiences make theatres substantial amounts of money at Christmas, so why not programme work for them during the rest of the year?”
McEneaney’s determination and vision have generated a raft of successful productions, including The Family Hoffmann, performed in a circus tent; The Musician, a children’s opera in a collaboration with the composer Conor Mitchell; and adaptations of the books The Amazing Book Eating Boy, by Oliver Jeffers, Under the Hawthorn Tree, by Marita Conlon McKenna, and Death, Duck and the Tulip, by the German author and illustrator Wolf Erlbruch, which dealt with death and the afterlife.
McEneaney pinpoints Nivelli’s War, the moving story of a Holocaust survivor, as both an artistic landmark and the start of the company’s partnership with Way.
“I was directing a piece for the Imagine stage in Bethesda, Maryland, and Charlie was there, working on another piece. We were two people far from home who would go out to eat together of an evening. We had very different approaches to theatre. He was all about the spoken word, and I was very much about the visual. But, instinctively, we knew we wanted to work together.
“He has an extensive knowledge of German culture, and I have a lot of knowledge about magic. I told him about a magician from Berlin called Herbert Levin, who survived Auschwitz by doing tricks in the camp. Having lost his family, he moved to America after the war, changed around the letters in his name and became the Great Nivelli. The show ended up on Broadway and was the first time a really deep, strong narrative and the visual aspect of Cahoots’s work had merged in a meaningful way.”
Much of the company’s work has been in unspoken theatre, relying on mime, visual effects and physical skills to tell the story. One such piece was Egg, which prompted an early breakthrough in the US.
“We were invited to a festival, and by the time we clicked our fingers we’d been offered a four-month tour,” McEneaney says. “That show resonates even more with me now. I’d been reading a book called Egg and Bird to my son, who was then two. I wrote a non-verbal show about a baby bird growing up and leaving its nest. My son is now 19 and in his first year at university. So it’s happened for real.”
Penguins, a co-production with Birmingham Rep, was a dance piece about two male penguins caring for an unhatched egg and raising the chick. Made at a time when the subject of same-sex parenting was being widely discussed, it was an example of young people’s theatre subtly reflecting what was happening in society.
“We never set out to say to our young audiences, ‘This is the message’,” McEneaney says. “We are never preachy or didactic. A message is quietly embedded, then it resurfaces in the car on the way home or around the dinner table. Young people are sponges. They will feel that subliminal content and it will emerge naturally in conversations or questions.”
He describes The Vanishing Elephant as a synergy of spectacle and storytelling that happened almost by accident.
“When Nivelli’s War was playing at the New Victory Theatre I was given a guided tour and told that Houdini had vanished an elephant on that very stage. I knew that wasn’t correct. He had done it at the Hippodrome, which actually backed on to the New Victory’s stage.
“I was immediately fascinated, not so much with how Houdini had made an elephant disappear but how an elephant from India ended up on a stage in New York. On the flight home I storyboarded that show. I knew that it had to start in India, with a wee boy befriending an elephant, and that it should end with an old man, who was once that wee boy. The story’s aesthetic came almost fully formed in my head. I drew it out in one sitting, got home, gave the storyboard to Charlie and asked him to work his magic on it. And, boy, he did.”
These days Cahoots spends a significant amount of time performing in the United States. Clearly there is a financial incentive, but, as McEneaney explains, there are other reasons, too.
“Yes, it’s profitable, but it’s also a market that allows us to reinvest in our space here. Even more important is that we’re using local artists. When we tour here our contracts are short, but we can take artists and technicians to the States and create long, extended tours.
“We’ve built a strong reputation that has generated funding for projects which will inevitably end up on the stage back home. Private donors and the venues themselves are wanting to invest. So we are no longer over-reliant on public funding. We’ve identified independence as a goal, and that has involved some serious risk-taking.
“In the current political and financial environment it would be easy to lose sight of our frontline services, but our primary focus will always be on what a child sees on a stage. If we can’t deliver a piece of work to our required standard we won’t do it. Our scale has shifted, and our creative ambition has shifted with it. I want more young people to see and experience our work. I want to create work that is bold and big and ambitious. I’m not embarrassed to say that.”
The Vanishing Elephant, staged by Cahoots, is at Southbank Centre, London, May 29th-June 1st; Buxton Opera House, June 6th-8th; Oxford Playhouse, June 11th-14th; and Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, June 18th-21st
