Anna’s dramatic fight for survival
Anna Scher is an acclaimed drama teacher whose methods have inspired countless young hopefuls to achieve greatness. Following a decline into depression, she is now fighting to regain her place at the theatre that bears her name PAUL DONOVAN reports.
The name Anna Scher is well known throughout the drama world for the teaching methods which she developed at her Islington theatre school.
Past students include Linda Robson and Pauline Quirke of “Birds of a Feather” fame, Kathy Burke (both Kathy Burke and Pauline Quirke are former Irish Post Award winners), Martin and Gary Kemp, Patsy Palmer and Natalie Cassidy who plays Sonia in Eastenders.
All was going well at the theatre school until Anna was struck down with depression. Her mental condition totally disabled her for two years but by March 2002 she was back ready to take up the reins.
However, the trustees of the theatre had other ideas and she has been fighting ever since to get her theatre back.
A past winner of The Irish Post community award, Anna has a very strong attachment to Ireland. She lived the first 14 years of her life as a student in a convent in Cork.
“I didn’t want to come to England,” she admits. Over the years she has made regular visits to Belfast doing cross community work. In 1979 she did her first workshops at the same time as Lord Mountbatten was assassinated.
“It is certainly better in Northern Ireland now than it was. As Gandhi said we must start with the children. The more integrationism at child level the better,” said Anna.
For the past couple of months Anna has been conducting her drama classes out of the Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church hall in Kings Cross. She has been working out of the church hall due to being effectively forced out of the Anna Scher Theatre.
Towards the end of 1999 Anna had a breakdown and it took until March 2002 before she was given a clean bill of health and allowed to return to work.
The breakdown was brought on by overwork or as Anna puts it “one minute I was teaching the Danes and the next I'm seeing to the drains.”
It was the drains or the routine maintenance work around the school building that seemed to prove the final straw that broke the camel’s back.
Anna is a workaholic admitting to often working 24-hour days and routinely only getting four hours sleep. The breakdown crept up on her.
She describes it in terms of her inner sanctum no longer being there to provide the support. Ironically, part of that inner sanctum over the decades that she had operated from the theatre school was provided by the board of trustees.
It was these individuals who later did their best to force her out of the teaching school that still carries her name.
She said: “The consultant said to me ‘you’ll find that close friends will disappear’.
“And he was right. I’ve now got a new inner sanctum.”
When Anna had recovered from her breakdown she returned to the school and was effectively put on trial doing 25 lessons for free while a fully-paid student teacher oversaw her.
After that she was given two sessions a week to work with the young actors and actresses.
Anna describes herself as “an Irish Jewish Lithuanian integrationist.” The integrationist work involves working across faiths and creeds which she has done all over the world.
In Asia she has worked with Muslims and Hindus, in the North of Ireland with Catholics and Protestants and with the different faith groups in the Middle East.
It was a few days before she was about to go and undertake such work in the Middle East that Anna says she received a letter from the director of the Anna Scher Theatre School declaring that “the method of delivery of the drama is to be controlled by the director under the overall authority of the trustees.”
The letter continued stating that “the content of the classes must follow the objects of the charity namely education through drama for young people. Classes cannot be used as a platform to advance issues such as peace studies, discrimination studies or the like.”
The audacity she felt in the letter was not lost on Anna. She had created the whole methodology of teaching drama that had proved so successful at the school. Yet she felt the trustees were seeking to dictate how she should work.
It was the more holistic view of what acting really should entail, including wider issues like peace and non-discriminatory behaviour that had proved so successful. Now the board of trustees of the theatre — which had made its name and reputation from Anna Scher — were telling her what she could and could not do.
In February, Anna refused to comply, withdrew from the school and set up in Father Jim Kennedy’s church hall. From there Anna is now running three sessions a week with 50 to 70 attending.
Meanwhile as word spreads over how badly Anna has been treated by the school the numbers attending drama classes there dwindle.
Anna has had hundreds of letters of support from former and present pupils as well as people in the international peace movement including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Yolanda King (the daughter of Martin Luther King and Arun Ghandi the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi).
“What is happening in our world today must concern all of us. Violence is multiplying rapidly and children are victims of this for the most part. In the circumstances, to marginalise a dedicated worker like Anna would be a retrograde step. I hope you will reconsider your earlier decision,” wrote Arun Ghandi to the director of the Anna Scher Theatre School.
Natalie Cassidy felt “disgusted and compelled to write” to the director.
“It was a place I was taught more than drama, it taught me how to treat people and more than any school ever did,” wrote Cassidy.
It has been the support of her students and a burning desire to overcome injustice that has kept Anna going in the struggle to get back her theatre.
“I try to live my life by the truth,” said Anna. She believes that she has been fighting discrimination all her life and now she has become the subject of it.
She has taken the methods developed in Islington worldwide. “The aims and values used in Islington have been taken to India, Ireland, Bosnia and I hope to go to Rwanda to do some work with Tutsis and Hutus this year,” said Anna.
“I style myself a teacher, a writer and peace activist. I go into a country as an integrationist working with people right across the board. I can be moved by something like the Soweto uprising.”
Anna admits that she is a pacifist and if attacked she would feel unable to fight back. Maybe not in a physical sense but certainly Anna is fighting back.
|
