Kids' Week - Getting Children Into Theatres

Kids' Week is a fantastic concept that comes around every August. Any child aged 16 or under can see participating London theatre shows when accompanied by a full paying adult - it gets children into the theatre, hopefully fostering a love of plays, ballets, and musicals (all creative arts really), and is a great treat for the end of the summer holidays.

We've taken advantage of Kids' Week twice now. In 2014, my daughter Alice (3 at the time) and I went to see The Tiger Who Came To Tea, which we both loved, and which Alice still talks about to this day. This year we went to The Garrick Theatre just off Leicester Square to see Let It Be.

What a hit!

Let It Be is the story of The Beatles told purely through their songs, played by excellent sound-alike musicians in all the right costumes, in chronological order. The audience is actively encouraged to stand up, dance, sing along, take photos, and even video the performances. It is a totally immersive theatre experience that everyone, whether they know the songs of The Beatles or not, can get into.

Alice (now 4) has been aware of The Beatles and their music all her life. Our household doesn't really 'do' modern music, stopping somewhere in the early 00s, apart from the odd song here and there. 80s and 90s are my preferred decades, whereas my husband adores the music of the 50s and 60s, and especially The Beatles. Before yesterday (no pun intended), however, Alice hadn't been a mega fan, as such. She just enjoyed some of the songs. Now, though, she is obsessed. She has been listening to the music all day. She has been trying - with a little success - to pick out the tunes on the piano. She wants to see the show again.

Her favourite songs are Here Comes The Sun and "All The Lonely People" (otherwise known as Eleanor Rigby).

And that's what Kids' Week is all about. It shows children that there is a different form of entertainment out there than can lead them to open up their own creative outlets. And who knows where that will take them?

Crocodiles in Cream

On 7^th August, I was lucky enough to be invited to watch the play Crocodiles in Cream at the Barn Theatre in Smallhythe Place. Smallhythe was the country home of the famous Victorian actress Ellen Terry, and The Barn was her own private theatre. These days, the National Trust has opened the theatre to the public, and there are often wonderful shows put on there.

Crocodiles in Cream is one such show.

This one man play details the life of Lewis Carroll during his time as a don at Christ Church College, Oxford, where he lived alone for 40 years. Superbly acted by the wonderful Kevin Moore, this was a different portrayal to the many other biographies of Carroll – the Rev Charles Dodgson – that have come before. The shy, witty, eccentric, funny, brilliant, yet tormented man that Lewis Carroll was is given a chance to tell his own story, to give his own side of himself, through his writing, letters, and poetry.

In Crocodiles in Cream we learn of Carroll’s love of photography, specifically taking pictures of the little girls he so loved. The play makes slightly uncomfortable viewing with twenty first century eyes and minds, and the audience must question whether they wish to take Carroll’s naivety – as he himself views it – as truth or not. Even Carroll himself admits that his contemporaries find it strange that he takes children to his room and on short holidays to Eastbourne, but he protests his innocence, explaining that they are simply friends. Yes in another of his letters to one girl’s mother, he asks whether the girl is ‘kissable’. And why, if there was nothing untoward in his relationship with the many children he heartily proclaimed to love, did so many parents soon prevent the man from making contact with them. This included little Alice Liddell’s mother. We learn that Alice herself, as an adult and with children of her own, ignored Carroll’s pleas for her to visit when she was in Oxford.

Through these letters, poems, and more, we begin to understand exactly how distraught Carroll was when Alice was no longer there to be his muse. When she grew up, when she left him – or was made to leave him.   

Moore gave Carroll a pathos that, notwithstanding the strangeness of the man’s relationship with the children, was heart breaking to watch. 

Begin As You Mean To Go On: Children and Reading

It's one of my big things, something I'm particularly passionate about, and something I've been able to work personally on since the birth of my daughter, Alice, on 10th October 2010.

Children and reading.

Reading to children and with children, letting them choose their own books, watching their excited faces when they learn to turn the pages by themselves, or when they walk into a library for the first time.

It makes a difference. It shapes their lifelong love - or otherwise - of books, and therefore it's an important part of growing up. It can make them who they become. I know it did with me.

The best part is, it can be shared with one or both parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, teachers, or anyone else come to that, but it can also be a solitary pursuit, and there's enjoyment to be had in reading alone as well. That's a lesson in itself.

I have incredibly clear memories of sitting with my mother and listening intently as she read from one of my many story books. Time together, peaceful and serene and perfect. There was a library not too far from our house, and once a week or so we would walk there to exchange old books for new. I had a special book bag, and collected badges that the librarians had on their desk.

Books for birthday presents were some of the most exciting, more cherished than toys or clothes, and book tokens... Well, the magic was endless when I opened an envelope and those fluttered out! My own 'money' to buy my own books with.

I wanted Alice to experience that joy, so when I was still pregnant, I collected as many books as I could, and stored them on shelves in her nursery, ready for the time when she would start looking through them. Picture books, cloth books, hardback, paperback, classics and new creations - she has hundreds.

And as soon as she was born, I read to her. She was a few hours old, the hospital visitors had gone, and I fished a tiny little book of nursery rhymes out of my hospital bag. That night, the tiny baby in my arms heard all about the twinkling stars, baa-ing black sheep, and an egg that no one could fix.

It went on like that. I read to her whenever I could.

Now, at just over two and a half, Alice loves her books. Whenever we go on a car journey, she must have at least three to leaf through, even if we're only popping to the shops. We read together every day - I read the 'real' story to her, and then she 'reads' her own version to me. When she goes to bed, she asks for some books, and she sits poring over them until she finally nods off.

I can't ask for more than that.

Flash Fiction: I Watched for 50 Years

I never spoke to her. I never spoke to the woman that I saw almost every day over fifty years, but I knew her. Not her name, or her age, or any of that stuff, but I knew what she felt. Seeing someone so often for so long gives you that insight. I smiled with her, wept for her, loved her and hated her in equal measures. She broke my heart and made my days worth living. And on the days that I didn’t see her, I felt sad. No, more than sad. I was bereft. Those days felt empty.

I first saw her on the day my husband and I moved into our house. We were dog-tired, dragging boxes from moving lorry to hallway, dining room, spare bedroom and so on and so on. We couldn’t afford a proper removal firm, so we did it ourselves. It was, I remember it in perfect, picture-clear clarity, on my journey from the front door to the lorry to help my husband carry our mattress to our new room when I saw her. She was walking along the street, just about to pass our house, pushing a big, ungainly pram. She was wearing a bright blue coat and carried no bag. The baby was crying, but no big, hearty sobs, just a little mewling, he or she was obviously tired. Its mother looked tired too, her eyes bloodshot, her walk slow. But she was smiling down at her child, her cheeks reddened by the brisk winter wind.

I smiled, nodded, and she followed suit, welcoming me to the neighbourhood. The same thing happened a few other times over the next five decades. We didn’t know each other, never would in the proper sense of the word, but we were polite nonetheless. Sometimes I wish I’d asked her in for coffee or a piece of cake or something. Anything. We’d have been friends, probably. But as it was, I didn’t, and she passed by.

For fifty years I watched her pass by. I would wait for her some days, arrange appointments around her, pretend I was doing anything other than waiting for the woman. My husband never knew. He may have wondered why there were days when my mood was low (the days when she missed her walk, or I missed her), but he never questioned me. I wonder what I would have said if he had?

There were other days when my mood was changed by the woman, without her ever even knowing she’d done it. The day when, about two years after I’d first seen her, I noticed her belly was growing. Another baby. I was excited for her. For nine months I watched her getting bigger and bigger, getting slower and slower, and then I didn’t see her at all for a few weeks. They were worrying times for me. But then she started walking again, now with a toddler and a new baby in that same old pram. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt that happy about anything.

I watched the children grow, and on the day when I saw her walking alone for the first time, I realised they were now both at school, and I wept with her, wept for her loneliness and for her wondering what she would do without them during the day. She still walked, and I could gauge the school holidays by whether I saw the three of them or just her. I wondered what else she did. That would maybe have been the perfect time to speak to her, to invite her over, but of course I didn’t do it.

In years to come I noticed that although it was the school holidays, she walked alone. The children, two boys, too old, too cool to walk with their old mum.

But still she walked. She was getting slower as she aged, but she didn’t stop.

And many years later, there was that pram again. Squeaking and ancient but just as good as new really, with a new baby in it. A grandchild, I assumed, and I liked that idea. The walks continued and once a week there was that pram. I’d sit at my window, old now myself, and watch her.

Another couple of years passed. And then she didn’t walk anymore. It was over, just like that. I never saw her again. I had watched this woman mature, her hair grey, wrinkles appearing, her life flowing by as she walked by my house day after day for fifty years.

I drifted away from the window and found other things to do.

©Lisamarie Lamb 2011