This website contains information about plays in Latin written for primary school children. Each play has been given performances by children aged between 8 and 11 who have been studying Latin using the excellent and popular Minimus courses created by Barbara Bell:
Minimus - Starting Off in Latin
Minimus Secundus
Much more information about Minimus can be found on the Minimus website.
The following are the plays currently presented on this website:
dulcifex - the nice-maker (the first very successful production took place on 16th March 2008, with a cast of 10 children aged 8 or 9, and three adults.)
puer Iesus in templo - the boy Jesus in the temple
fur parva - the little thief
infantes in silva - "Babes in the Wood"
Calypso and Odysseus - "Calypso and Odysseus"
All but the last are substantial plays, some quite serious in content, but accessible to children of the 8-11 age groups. The dulcifex, in contrast, is a comedy making gentle fun of everybody within sight (particularly the gods) with a laugh - or at least a smile - on nearly every line! Calypso and Odysseus is a fun-but-sad five-minute play for an end-of-term Assembly, based on Homer's Odyssey Book V.
Other plays will be put on the site as available.
These plays are all copyrighted. Some are supported by additional material (e.g. interlinear scripts) that are important for practical performances. Some material material is on the site, but is concealed
In writing a play for young children in Latin, the first requirement is that the characters and the action must be interesting to and understandable by the young actors at a certain level. Thus, the plot must be straightforward, and must be emphasised by the actions. This does not preclude deeper levels in the plot that would be understood by adults and not children. Beware, though, of adult-only jokes, for the children can rumble you, and they may well be far more aware than you would suspect! Or, worse, one of them may demand an explanation. That's fine, until one of their peers answers the question for you!
The Latin does not have to be at the level of the children's grasp of Latin. Making it so may severely limit the dramatic possibility of the play. Using an interlinear script gives them a quite adequate comprehension of what is going on.
Physical action is useful - even essential; it not only challenges the children's acting ability; it helps keep them interested in what is going on even for children not directly involved. Also, children enjoy a little controlled violence (particularly when the goodies beat the baddies)!
Humour - perhaps quite earthy - and familiar human touches add to the charm that a play will have for the children.
Plays must have a happy ending, even if some tensions remain unresolved.
A play will often need adapting to the cast available. In the case of fur parva, for example, two members of the cast were identical twins, and their roles were tailor-made (although in practice, the performers would not need to be identical twins!).
Somehow, the audiences will probably have forgotten any Latin that they might have learned, so the play must have a narrator, who keeps the audience aware of and interested in what is going on! The narrator's part is an important one, and needs to be considered and written at the time that the play is written. The narrator also helps to bridge substantial cuts when these are necessary, since he or she can maintain the story-line without involvement of the actors.
When teaching Latin using the Minimus course it is important to work on Latin in class as a spoken language - and this is emphasised by the Minimus picture-stories. There is a generally accepted style of pronouncing Latin, and this needs to be adhered to in the performances of these plays. However, most children seem to find it quite hard to switch between English pronunciation and Latin, so getting the words in the plays pronounced correctly takes a lot of hard work by teacher and children. The earlier in their Latin course that they can be taught to accept Latin pronunciation the better. (This means having to go back to "sounding out" as they did when they were learning to read. In my class, the children are asked to read and write English using the Latin spelling, "borrowing" from English for sounds not used in Latin, such as "ch".)
A powerful tool that we are using in "the dulcifex" is to let the cast have a Word document with pronunciation built in. Each speaker in the script has a little loud-speaker adjacent to his/her name: double-click it, and the speech should sound, correctly pronounced. This seems to have been a success.
But in any case one has to take a relaxed attitude to pronunciation as performance-time approaches - fluency is more important in a production. I have learned not to despair if pronunciation is all over the place a week before the production, and the fluency isn't there - it will improve dramatically at the last moment!
All of the play scripts mark long vowels when needed. These are by no means obvious, which is why the Minimus course-book (as do other elementary Latin courses) carefully marks long vowels with bar over the letter.
We have not asked the children to learn the Latin by heart. Some would find it nearly impossible, while all would find memorising too heavy a burden in a busy school day. (They may have to learn by heart where they have complex actions to carry out!)
Instead, the children have used an interlinear script that contains also the stage directions and the narrator's script. This script has a word-by-word translation of the Latin into English, a scheme that has worked very well. Although the English, read literally, is weird, children are usually surprisingly good at rearranging the words at sight into reasonable English, particularly with practice. (We have occasionally asked them to rehearse scenes in English, using the interlinear script.)
These plays are designed to be acted with very modest theatrical resources. All the plays have had public performances in a church, using a minimum of scenery (or none, in the case of puer Iesus). infantes in silva called for a simple set representing a woodland scene. The dulcifex has called some more elaborate staging, since it calls for a window which is too high to be looked into. But the power of the imagination can get over this, perhaps.
Details can be found in the descriptions of the plays.
A number of props will be required for each play.
Attention needs to be paid to costumes, but nothing is needed that would be beyond the resources of cooperative children's parents. And you wouldn't need a complete woolly wolf outfit to represent a wolf! The audience will fill the gaps with their imaginations!
This is, of course, a sensitive and delicate subject. You may write a play with particular young actors in mind, or you may have to accept a play that already exists. In both cases, you may have surprises and challenges.
For example, in writing puer Iesus, I had in mind a particular Year 6 girl (call her Katie; not her real name) to play Mary, and a particular boy (also Year 6, call him Jack) to play Joseph.
So I said: "Katie, I'd like you to play Mary. It's quite a difficult part."
"Why is it difficult?" she asked. "Because you're a mother, and that's always complicated" I responded. "All right," Katie agreed.
"And you, Jack", I said: "I'd like you to play Joseph, Mary's husband."
"Jack my husband?" said Katie. "No way! The deal is off!!" Oh dear. I felt very sorry for Jack, who was a very nice boy, too nice to be so directly humiliated. Boy-girl relationships at the age of 10 are already complex, but there hadn't been any personal tension between Jack and Katie that I was aware of, and this was a complete surprise.
I pondered the situation, concluding that the matter was one of "personal space", and I decided to call the Year 6 children to see me at morning-break the next day. "Katie," I said, "I really need you to play Mary, and I promise that there will be no hanky-panky between Mary and Joseph." "Well, all right" she somewhat reluctantly agreed after a pause. "OK with you, Jack?" I asked. "OK," he agreed, and all was well. Both children gave good performances on the day.
In recent classes, there has been a preponderance of girls for some reason. One year, our one and only boy dropped out from the class quite early, so putting on fur parva with a cast of seven girls required one girl to play two male parts (the wicked Pedops and Marcus, the wronged merchant) and another to play the lead male part (Lucius). All was well: both girls took this in their stride. Whether it would have worked out so well with a mixed cast I don't know; but I think that it would probably have been all right. In other plays, we have a mixed cast, with some male parts being played by a girl.
The narrator needs special consideration. A child who reads clearly would do fine. Giving him or her a microphone would be an excellent idea. But you may consider having an adult play the part. In fur parva last year, the children's form-teacher did the job superbly. He entered into the spirit of it by posing as a Victorian school-master (complete with cane) with the play put forward as a lesson in Latin for the audience. This went down really well.
You should probably consider involving the children in making casting decisions. Clearly, they must have a framework, but this has worked well. You may need to adapt the play a little to add to (or to diminish) acting challenges. In Scene III of fur parva, the main character was changed from Lucius to Pappagus - this in fact gave a major improvement to the shape of the play from the player's viewpoint - although I wound up playing the part myself.
You may well find it desirable to cut the Latin, perhaps temporarily, to ease the burden on the cast. This needs doing with care, but the narrator should be able to maintain the dramatic impact. By experience, it's a good idea not to have too many versions of the script, though, so the process of cutting really needs thinking about ahead of time. fur parva interlinear scripts are available with several levels of cutting.
Finally, adult stand-ins are often required in an emergency, and, in any case, casting an adult in a particular role may be the only way to have the necessary resources. The plays on this site easily accommodate adults to play adults. The Narrator part can always be taken by an adult, and you may find this desirable anyway.
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