ABSTRACT
In Hans Christian Andersen’s story ‘In the Nursery’ an old man and his granddaughter stage their own version of the romantic domestic play to which the parents have gone, building a theatre from books and old boxes and turning a broken pipe and scraps of clothing into actors. Drama, has, in practice, often been inseparable from other forms of writing, including that for young audiences, as Andersen’s story again illustrates. Many theorists, especially in America, seek first to distinguish between the ‘doing’ and ‘seeing’ activities implied by the root meanings of the words ‘drama’ and ‘theatre’ to propose a continuum from imaginative, imitative play, regarded as natural and innate in children, to formal theatrical presentation of dramatic scripts. Jack Zipes has argued that in a globalised world most contemporary plays for children are produced for the play’s sake, not for the children’s; most pander to the entertainment industry’s expectations and conceal power relations.
