I wanted to talk principally about the notion of transformation - and you just had one. You were going to get me and you get someone with real intelligence.

My keynote is to take a quotation from the revolutionary Russian psychologist Levigotsky, who said: 'the child is always a head taller when he or she plays.' What I want to do is to look at the connection between play, learning and art, and restore to this conference the notion of make-believe, the world of as-if as it connects to a broader aesthetic that provides a sense of story, of character, of roles and characters which allow us the possibility to transform the world. And I want to also implicitly challenge what I perceive as a rather more limited, and possibly functional notion of play, as being engineered by the big corporations and the computer magnates and my 64,000 dollar question is: does the video game or computer game contain the potential for an interaction in which something can change? Does it give us a tool for a meaningful interaction that can challenge and change our perceptions, or is it rather more limited than that.

So I'm just going to race through some elementary material about learning, play and art. Students of play have seen that it's significant for children's development and learning. I think we are all aware of that. On the surface it would appear to be action-orientated but paradoxically, through play, the child is liberated from action, from the constraints of the real, and moves in the direction of abstract thought. Again, listen to Levigotsky, he says that 'the phenomenon of play involves a paradox, a condition in which something is both real and not real at the same time.' There's a kind of mastery, aestethic tension, cathartic release and delight, therefore. Now this step in the direction of abstract thought, where the meaning created is something other than the actions and objects present in say, the child's field of perception, nonetheless the child still requires a pivot in the form of an action to replace the real one.

Take a very simple example: that of a stick to represent a horse. Now when a stick is used as a horse, the stick becomes the pivot for savouring the meaning of horse from a real horse. So in play therefore, a new relationship is created between the imaginary and the real. And that's what makes it so exciting for educationalists and for people in the world of aesthetics. So to echo yesterday's debate, realistic toys, to me it seems that they lead mainly to motor activity and not into the realm of make-believe, perhaps because they cannot function as those pivots for meaning. Levigotsky again: 'the child is always a head taller when he or she plays' and the greatest toy we have is our capacity to imagine and to make stories, to make-believe. According to Heisinger, 'all art derives from play'. He sees a close affinity between play and every form of art. And in particular between play and the drama, which is my sphere of activity. But artistic imagination will always remain sharply distinguished from the kind of imagination which characterises play activity. In an artistic mode there's not merely a re-arrangement of objects, of materials, of characters, of roles and situations but also the potential for transformation, the possibility of change. Objects may change their identity but they don't become conscious, aesthetic forms. They're not open therefore to reflection and meaning. So whereas the child plays with things, the artist plays with forms. And a concern with forming is one of the basic criteria for aesthetic activity. So fundamentally what I'm getting at is: what differentiates art from play is a conscious and reflective attitude, an intention to produce meaningful forms that change the way that we see the world. Seeing the world, as Brecht would put it, through fresh eyes.

Let me move on to a slightly more concrete discourse, which is basically: what I do. I'm the artistic director of the Unicorn theatre for children. It's the oldest theatre for children in the UK. It's been around for 50 years. It's based in the West End. Most of you probably know it because it's next door to the Photographers Gallery in Leicester Square. I've been there for the last 18 months and it's one of only two building-based theatres in Britain. In it's history, it's pioneered multi-racial casting, work with deaf performers and deaf children, with many new plays from a diverse range of ethnic sources. And we're committed to the highest standards of performance and writing for children. Our aim is to transform and challenge people's perceptions of what is possible in children's theatre, not to expect to believe in the obvious. The last show that we did was a show based on the work of Beatrix Potter in which there wasn't an animal costume in sight. We work through the medium of symbol and metaphor. Another element of our work which is critical to us is the ingredient of participation; the sense that we hand over responsibility for the drama to our children and to the families that come to our theatre. So for us, theatre is not a passive exercise. I mean, under any circumstances audiences are required to exercise their imagination actively, like the child with the stick. But through our education and workshop program, what we're trying to do is to aim not only to share ways of creating illusion but also - to echo Barbara Stafford's words yesterday, who I think sort of picked up on the Brechtian idea that our job is to see through the illusion - is not only to create the illusion but also to hand over the tools in which that illusion can be shattered. Because without that, we're incapable of transforming the medium through which we work and therefore the world which it represents.

After 30 years of having been at the Arts Theatre in the West End, we now have to move on. Are we happy with the traditional building, the traditional notion that theatre takes place in the institutions that we're used to. Are we happy with the traditional relationship between audience and performers. These are the sort of questions that we're dealing with at the moment. Should we be touring to where children are? Or do they deserve an imaginative centre of excellence which is fully technically equipped? How do we offset the fact that there's an enormous shrinkage in public subsidy for the traditional arts like theatre in Britain? Do we go into partnership with the big, new media? There's a friend of mine who's a member of the audience here, Michael Custer, who said to me: 'Would you contemplate the notion of being called, for example, the Nintendo Unicorn in the future?' - an argument which isn't a million miles away from what's going on in London at the moment at the Royal Court. Where it may well sort of transform it's name and become the Royal Court theatre in order to sort of satisfy it's own need to exist with the support of foundation money. So we are currently searching for partners who share our core beliefs that children should be seen as citizens and not just as consumers. Citizens with rights who deserve the same respect as anyone else. Children who's capacity for play and fundamentally for make-believe makes them natural partners in our quest to change people's perceptions about what is possible.

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