We sat down for an exclusive interview with Alex Byrne co-Artistic Director of NIE and co-writer of Snow Mice! Alex Byrne. Snow Mice is a collaboration between the Egg at Theatre Royal Bath (the South West’s leading venue for young audiences) and NIE, an award-winning company that makes theatre shows for young people and their families, with both companies sharing work internationally.
This show runs from 20th November to 11th January at The Egg, Theatre Royal Bath.
Tickets here
Snow Mouse has been a much-loved production for over a decade. What inspired you to revisit this story and expand it into Snow Mice! for a slightly older audience?
It was originally Kate Cross who runs the Egg Theatre, who suggested this project to me. I was immediately interested and excited because I’ve been thinking for awhile about making a Christmas show with an earlier years focus. After watching the original Snow Mouse show, I immediately said yes I’d like to do it because I think it’s a great idea! The original is really great. It’s a delightful show for early years audience and I thought there was some scope for further development. For a broader story that further unleashed the energy and the anarchy of the snow mouse.
You’ve said that what you loved about the original was its “sense of playfulness” and “subtle parallels between the experience of the mouse and the child.” How have you preserved that spirit while deepening the story’s themes in this new version?
The original Snow Mouse has a super simple story about a wonderful adventure in a snowy garden and the imagination and wonder that that brings. We have tried to take that story further. Out of the garden and into the landscape beyond where all sorts of additional obstacles and wonders can be encountered. And of course, this is a show with three children and three (maybe more) mice! In a show for slightly older children and families you can encounter different kinds of obstacles and problems, and of course with more mice and more children, there’s more scope for variety of relationships, interactions and complexities.
This is your first collaboration with The Egg, a theatre renowned for its children’s programming. What drew you to work with them, and how does their creative environment influence your approach to directing Snow Mice!?
All of the shows that I make are for children and families and although I’ve made lots of shows in different places, I’ve never worked at The Egg before. It’s a beautiful space and the fact that it is specially designed and focused on a young audience makes it really inspiring to working here. Some other shows that I’ve made have visited The Egg on tour but making a show specifically for this space that uses its special qualities, quirks and possibilities is a really delightful prospect. The team at The Egg are focused entirely on sharing work with a young audience and their care and attention to detail is both a challenge and an inspiration. We’ve been able to have a staged development process and to try out some of our work with some young families along the way and you don’t find those possibilities with every venue! Both is really lucky to have a venue like this.
Snow Mice! uses live music, sound effects, and puppetry to bring its world to life. How do you balance these elements to maintain both the intimacy and wonder that make children’s theatre so special?
Live music is key for me and lots of the show shows that I make and it’s always a struggle and sometimes a delight to find the right balance of different elements that can tell the story and share it really effectively with a young audience. We need to make sure that the show uses those elements as effectively as possible to tell the story we want to tell. I hope that we’re able to find a balance between some knock-about comic fun and tom-foolery and the sense of a wide and expensive snow-covered world that’s really exciting to explore. Music can be really powerful in doing this as it speaks immediately and directly to our feelings and can be used to dynamically shape the atmosphere on stage from one moment to the next. We’re really lucky to work with a live musician on stage who has also improvised, composed, and developed the music for the show.
NIE is known for its international, ensemble-driven approach to theatre-making. How does that ethos shape a show like Snow Mice!, which is rooted in the simplicity of a winter’s night and a child’s imagination?
I think I’ve bought the devising process that I’m very used to to the making of this show. We’ve been working in the studio with a wonderful musician improvising and creating live music alongside and as an intrinsic part of the devising of the show. Everyone’s contributed to the development of the story and the themes and ideas that sit at the heart of the show. The challenge is always to find the right balance between simplicity, fun, narrative and wonder that can sit really beautifully inside what will be a transformed setting at The Egg for Christmas.
For many children in Bath, Snow Mouse was their first experience of theatre. What do you hope today’s young audiences will take away from Snow Mice! as they encounter this new adventure for the first time?
I hope that they can really enjoy the story and think about home, friendship and family and what it means to them. And if it’s their second experience of the theatre, I hope that they can enjoy it as much as they enjoyed the original Snow Mouse.