Steven Kynman leans forward to show me his arm. “Look! All the hairs standing up! And that’s just from thinking about being on stage at the Globe.” Yesterday, when he actually rehearsed there, “I swear to God, those hairs didn’t go down the whole time.”
He leans back. He’s just had Covid, he says, still feels a bit emotional. His eyes shine. “I believe in the spirit of spaces. The wood is from Shakespeare’s time. It’s like a musical instrument; like standing in the middle of a guitar. I have never in my life felt more giddy about working somewhere.”
Kynman is 46 and looks on the anonymous end of a young Derek Jacobi. He’s not much recognised. Working recently with a famous actor, Kynman mentioned that he knew Justin Fletcher, the CBeebies star who has popularised Makaton, a sign language for children with special needs.
The actor began to cry. “He said, ‘Can you please tell Justin I learned to communicate with my son because of him?’” Then he asked Kynman what he did. “I said: ‘Oh, I’m Robert the Robot.’ He just repeated ‘Oh my God’ for about 30 seconds and then said: ‘I have to call my wife.’”
If Fletcher – AKA Mr Tumble – is the most familiar face on preschool TV, Kynman is its most chameleonic. As well as playing the cheerful tin butler on Justin’s House, he’s a regular on sketch show Gigglebiz, voices Fireman Sam, Lofty in Bob the Builder and most of Thomas and Friends, and was a dazzling baddie in CBeebies’ last Christmas panto.
That annual show is just one of the hybrid productions the channel mounts each year: performed live, screened later. They do the Proms, ballets and, since 2016, a condensed Shakespeare, with Kynman as the Bard, popping in and out of the wings to explain what’s going on.
Previous years have seen 50-minute trims of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest and Romeo & Juliet. This year it’s As You Like It, and their first time at the Globe – a long-term ambition not just of the cast but the theatre’s artistic director, Michelle Terry.
“My little girl is five and a half,” she says, “and she’s probably spent more time with CBeebies people than me and her dad.” The collaboration is part of Terry’s drive to “demystify Shakespeare and get people through the doors – and the earlier the better. What CBeebies do brilliantly is find those avenues of fairytale and use them to prise the text open.”
She has herself starred in As You Like It, and the director of that Globe production, Elle While, takes the reins for this one too, working from an adaptation by CBeebies comedy supremo Nathan Cockerill.
Cockerill’s tactic has been to scrap melancholy subplots – no more Phoebe, Silvius or Jacques (Kynman’s Shakespeare inherits the “All the world’s a stage” speech) – and add some helpful bookends.
So Andy Day, usually seen halfway up a brontosaurus, plays a modern-day developer who wants to demolish the Globe and build flats. Shakespeare (somehow still going) assembles some players – mostly CBeebies regulars – to put on a show and persuade him otherwise.
The text is whittled but faithful. No bowdlerisation; as much verse as possible. The hope is it will soak in somehow. “At that age, language is still mercurial,” says Kynman. “It’s not solid metal yet, it’s liquid mercury.” He speaks excitedly of seeing big epiphanies on small faces. After a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, two tiny siblings quoted lines back to him. “It genuinely mattered to them. Words put down 400 years ago connected. That’s beyond magic.”
It’s not just under-sixes who appreciate the approach. “I’m still trying to understand Shakespeare’s text,” says Day. “You’re constantly learning. A teacher friend of mine said: ‘I show my A-level students CBeebies versions of Shakespeare because they then go: ‘Oh, that’s what’s going on!’”
In fact, despite the apparent challenges, performing Shakespeare for 1,500 children might be more straightforward than doing so for adults. Rebecca Keatley, who plays Rosalind, is one of the channel’s chief continuity presenters. Adults can forget how sophisticated a child’s sense of performance is, she thinks. “They’re much more accepting. They’re like sponges. When they play they just think: I want to be a knight, or a pirate, or a nurse, or a firefighter. They just inhabit that character.”
Day agrees: “As long as it’s authentic enough and they’re engaged enough, they’ll accept anything. They don’t see race or gender.”
That’s another reason As You Like It – perhaps Shakespeare’s top cross-dressing comedy – is a good fit. For today’s children, thinks Terry, the play may actually “sit closer to what Shakespeare was exploring rather than what people have tried to squish it into. Kids are much more umbilically connected to their identity being multitudinous.”
While has three young children. “My experience is that it’s only as we grow older that we try and become animals of reason and rationale.” In the CBeebies version, Charles the wrestler is played by Joanna Adeyinka-Burford. The character was initially renamed “Charlie”, but that upset the scansion so they reverted to the original. “It’s very non-binary,” says While. The audience, she thinks, are unlikely to care – or notice.
There are four performances and eight days of rehearsal: generous by CBeebies standards, but breakneck for the theatre. No scope for tender exploration of the themes – “subtlety isn’t our queen at the minute,” says CBeebies series producer Anna Perowne. A brief discussion of what pastoral meant for the cast majored on the fact most of them are vegan. But, happily for While, they were all unusually primed to “revert to the ability of their imagination as a child” – something which usually takes considerable coaxing.
“CBeebies is all about the audience,” says Keatley. “The prime objective is: what can we give to them? Are we giving the right messaging? Are they getting what they need? How can we do it in a way that’s inclusive?”
Such a specific demographic limits performers’ potential for self-indulgence. “You cannot fool children,” says Kynman. “They will see through you. They’re like sniffer dogs for insincerity. And that’s wonderful because it forces you to commit.”
He has adopted Fletcher’s watchwords: commitment, clarity and communication. “Be honest, be sincere. Don’t just smile and tell the kids what you’re meant to say while in the back of your mind you’re thinking, ‘Oh, I could really do with defrosting that Yorkshire pudding’, because they spot it at 100 yards.”
Kynman trained as an engineer before moving into conventional acting (RSC, Sunday in the Park with George at the Menier), puppeteering (Muppet Treasure Island, Star Wars: The Last Jedi) and audio work (he recently narrated Jamie Vardy’s memoir). He used to be snooty about children’s TV. “I was very naive and arrogant. But now I would crawl across broken glass to work on CBeebies. It’s singlehandedly the most rewarding job I have ever done. You communicate with the child directly and there is nothing like it.”
Yes, some people undervalue it, he says; mostly those in the industry who’ve never done it. Not parents, though: “If you tried to take away CBeebies, they’d riot on Downing Street.”
They may yet need their placards. In May this year, it was announced both CBBC and BBC Four would be discontinued as broadcast services. The same fate may yet await their sister channel.
“I worry about it,” says Terry. Its teachings have been as valuable as conventional education for her child: “The curation is so clever and smart and tuned-in.” There’s a clear equivalence with the organisation she runs – and it would be easy to detect a call-to-arms in Cockerill’s added plot about saving the Globe from philistine capitalists.
After all, says Terry, Shakespeare founded the theatre with a public service remit. “It was the most amazing socio-economic model which said storytelling, cultural conversation, debate, nuance and multiple truths are a human right and should be for everybody. The idea of reducing that feels misguided and arrogant to me.”
It’s easy to be evangelical about CBeebies once you’ve been a beneficiary of its output. As the outpouring of affection and admiration surrounding its 20th anniversary in February demonstrated, its quality, ambition and agility far exceed what’s necessary – exemplified by projects such as the Shakespeare plays.
But it’s heartening that the people whose skills make it special seem, if anything, yet more invested. Kynman’s advocacy runs deep. Nobody does CBeebies for the cash, he says, welling up again. “It’s because we believe in trying to help children realise we can be better. Prejudice and sexism and hatred towards others are learned, and CBeebies is really, really good at going: kindness is your best weapon. And talking: don’t be afraid to open yourself up.”
He does so himself, unprompted. “I was heavily bullied at school,” he continues, “and learned to be funny to avoid that. My father, God rest him, was the kindest man I knew. I miss him every day. At his funeral, I said, ‘They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes, but I did. He was my dad.’”
He pauses. “I think this channel runs on kindness, and it means a lot to me. When I started working there, I went: ‘This, I get.’ And my dad was ever so proud.”
• As You Like It with CBeebies is at the Globe theatre, London, on 9 and 10 August. It will be broadcast next year.
CBeebies’ heavyweight recruits
Mark Rylance On Bing, the new Globe’s first artistic director offers soothing counsel to an emotional young bunny. Rylance plays Flop, a knitted carer of uncertain species, physically dwarfed but never rattled by his demanding charge. Flop’s endless gentleness is inspirational.
Derek Jacobi Over 100 episodes of In the Night Garden were voiced by the actor, whose curiosity about whether the Tombliboos have brushed their teeth or how Makka Pakka will stack his stones appears indefatigable. His rendition of Upsy-Daisy’s song has incredible welly.
Cathy Tyson The former RSC star, who made her name in Mona Lisa and won a Bafta this year for her role in Help, puts in a wonderfully warm and humourous voice performance as the resourceful grandmother in JoJo and Gran Gran.
Roger Allam The king of lugubriosity does lovely work as the narrator of Sarah & Duck, a charmingly inventive series about a nine-year-old and her quacky pal. Listen out for cameos from Simon Callow, Andy Nyman and Fiona Shaw.
Kathy Burke Forget Nil By Mouth. Surely the defining role of Burke’s career is as Miss Grizzlesniff, long-suffering T-Rex teacher in School of Roars (catchphrase: “Oh my claws!”). Fellow staff are played by Andrew Scott and Sarah Lancashire.
