Robin Hood is the tale of the fight for justice and freedom. A new production written by Daniel Bye portrays Robin as a young person taking refuge in the forest and raises questions about inequality that are relevant today. Emma Clegg talks to the production’s director Jenni Jackson.
The legend of the heroic outlaw Robin Hood, believed to come from 12th-century English folklore, has never faded, endlessly interpreted and reinvented over the years in literature, theatre, and cinema. Every generation knows the man – immortalised by figures such as Errol Flynn (1938), Frank Sinatra (1964), Sean Connery (1976), Kevin Costner (1991) and Russell Crowe (2010) – who robbed from the rich to give to the poor.
It remains a timeless tale because the poverty gap is the ultimate injustice. The rich have it all – power and untold luxury, and the poor are hungry, often homeless and can’t afford basic necessities. Robin Hood demonstrates that these systemic injustices are unfair and makes it his mission to redistribute wealth to benefit the poor. There is even a ‘Robin Hood effect’, where income is redistributed to reduce economic inequality.
The power of the Robin Hood narrative – and the reason that it has always resonated in popular culture – is that groups of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ can be identified in any society in any period of history, from the Roman Emperors and their slaves right up to the social divisions of Britain in the 2020s between those of wealth and influence and those living below the poverty line.
Kate Cross, Artistic Director of The Egg, and writer Daniel Bye asked Jenni Jackson to direct this new version of Robin Hood (with an encompassing audience bracket of six plus), because they were looking for a “kinetic and energetic production”. As a starting point they asked her to imagine Robin Hood not as the eponymous hero, but as a young person who is quite lost. The action is focused on the drive and excitement of Robin Hood, an outlaw living in the margins of society who chooses to try and rectify the inequality.
“We are establishing a world where teenagers have left their homes and are living in the forest. And we are playing out some of the dynamics that children might be seeing in the news. What does it mean to be occupying someone else’s land and to have no choice? This is a story that we know and recognise – there is lots of inequality today so it feels really relevant, and it also echoes news reports around immigrants and wars where communities are forced to flee their homeland”, says Jenni.
“What we are doing in this production is softly and playfully examining a world where children and young people are not allowed to be in the woods any more, or to hunt the stags, because they belong to the king. Their being in the forest is a transgression. But actually they are hungry and need to eat, so is it a transgression if it’s violating their right to be alive?”
The reason Jenni brings energy to the stage as a director stems from her history as a teenage judo champion. She started judo at the age of nine with her brother and sister, and ended up representing the UK competing internationally as a judoka. She describes the judo dojo as having represented a place for her to be seen and to challenge her body and her limitations.
“The thing that I loved about judo was that it is a team sport. Even though you fight an opponent and are one-to-one, you train together and you learn how to fail together, and you have to hit the mats over and over again and get up off the floor together. It doesn’t matter if you are seven years old and a white belt, because you can still take down a black belt if you have caught them in the right moment and your technique is good.
“And it’s not about size – in fact the bigger your enemy, once you have got under their centre of gravity you can take them down. Retrospectively there were huge life lessons that I was learning in that space. And it has parallels to the theatre in the way that you decide how to tell a story, right here, right now, and that really informs how I work. I always think of the body as the primary storytelling tool, because it contains all that data that we use instinctively.”
Jenni is mixed race and her Bolivian mother was an immigrant to the UK. “I’ve experienced the ways in which the world is unequal and seen it through a child’s eyes. That is quite formative, in terms of who is allowed in what space and on what terms. Spaces are designed and curated in lots of ways by a system of power, that we often can’t feel until it’s not working for us. My interest in theatre-making has also involved learning about the ways in which it’s possible to project into an occupied space.”
Jenni has a particular style of using the stage choreographically and in Robin Hood has collaborated with set designer April Dalton: “We are not trying to build a naturalistic forest, but we are alluding to a forest where these young people can climb off the floor. I really wanted the sense that they could climb up the trees or almost disappear, so we have structures similar to deer-stalking platforms where actors can be at a height as they talk to each other. It is as if The Egg has sprouted a forest – and the forest is coming to meet the theatre”.
The production is a good fit for Jenni, who describes herself as liking to ask questions about society and the way it shapes us, particularly telling stories from a woman’s perspective. In the case of her own family, she is fascinated by why her mother put her children into a judo club as an immigrant in the UK. The subject of Jenni’s production Wrestleladswrestle – which launched this autumn in Manchester and will tour in spring 2025 – plays with the theatricality of pro-wrestling, focusing on the reason why she signed up for judo classes as a child, and why there is a need for women to reasonably defend themselves, as well as the wider issue of oppression in society. “But out of that came all that joy I had in the judo club. And the other story behind that is the way we have to learn skills to be safe.”
“I really like the way these things stamp together. That is what we are searching for in this Robin Hood, a world that’s unstable because the leader has left, and there is an imposter surrogate in the King’s place, and the people are struggling in this chaotic world. Alongside that story is another about young people finding family, new ways to lead, ways in which they can be seen and heard, and learning how to gift that freedom to other people. I love that dance between the very difficult things in our life and the humanity that connects us.”
Robin Hood, The Egg, Theatre Royal Bath, 29 November – 11 January. Tickets £22.50/£17.50; theatreroyal.org.uk