Stage Mum

by Lisa Gee

  And perhaps the parents were taking their cue from the children, because if any among us were wondering whether there was any way we could sabotage someone else’s chances, in order to give our own offspring a better chance, we’d concealed it extremely well. All was sweetness, light, empathy and laughter. I began to wonder if maybe Dora and I had stumbled into a parallel universe that neither of us might ever want to return from. Perhaps that’s the start of the slippery slope to stage motherhood. At first, you try just one audition. Just one – it won’t do any harm. Then your child gets a recall and another until, eventually, he or she lands a part. It’s all so much fun, you want to do it again. And again and again. Pretty soon, you’re hooked. And that’s when it starts going bad – or, more accurately, when you start going bad. You need your next fix. So you do everything, no matter how mean, nasty and underhand, you can to make sure you get it. Before you know it, you’re dressing your acutely embarrassed son in lederhosen and yelling at him to smile whilst simultaneously demonstrating a faux-Germanic leg-and-bottom-slapping dance and keeping his place only 123rd in the audition queue (you made him stand there alone while you counted. Twice. From his spot to the front and then back again, to make sure that no one had pushed in in your absence). Or you threaten your little darling that unless she sneaks to the front and pretends she’s someone else’s daughter – someone so keen that they got out of bed obscenely early so their little darlings could legitimately be amongst the first seen – you’ll NEVER TAKE HER TO ANOTHER AUDITION AGAIN. UNDERSTAND???!!!??? Or, on a freezing cold winter’s day, you make your pubescent daughter bind her chest, remove her shoes and socks and stand in the gutter, hoping that the nice man with the measuring stick won’t notice that she’s too tall and too physically developed to audition for the role you’ve set your heart on her playing, and when he does notice, you scream, ‘SHE HAS TO BE SEEN. SHE’S PERFECT FOR THE PART! I SHOULD KNOW, I’M HER MOTHER!’

  The children were called in. A few of the parents popped out for coffee, the rest of us sat round the table or sprawled on the sofas. We talked about our children: which, if any, shows they’d been in before – this ranged from none to every major West End musical with kids in it as well as the odd high profile film – and which Sound of Music roles we thought they might be being considered for. The occasional sounds of angelic singing wafted through into the waiting area and temporarily silenced us.

  During these interludes, I wondered how the people responsible for selecting eighteen or twenty children – people who were, if Dora’s information was correct, mostly called Jo – from the sixty or so they’d whittled it down to could possibly do it. How could they decide which talented moppets were the right talented moppets? In the early stages it must’ve been comparatively easy – if they couldn’t sing and didn’t look feasibly Austrian, they were out – but surely all those who’d got this far must be capable of doing the things they had to do to play the parts.

  Although, to be fair, they hadn’t yet been tested on their ability to stay awake and continue functioning in front of a few thousand paying theatre-goers way past bedtime. I had concerns about this, but decided not to mention them to anyone connected with the production.

  The children were returned to us on reasonably good and only slightly hyperactive form, and we were told they’d let us know soon about the next round. Predictably, the first sentence out of Dora’s mouth was ‘Can I go to Bethany’s house?’

  Predictably, the first word out of mine was ‘No.’

  But we did go for coffee and cake together at a local café.

  ‘Did you get to be a boy today?’

  ‘Nah. Just Gretl again.’

  ‘I had to be Brigitta today,’ said Bethany, who’d been Marta the day before.

  Having failed in her attempt to secure an invitation to play at Beth’s house, Dora upped the ante and asked Rachel if she could move in with them. Rachel took the request in her stride. She didn’t look remotely panicked or even slightly fazed. ‘Not today,’ she replied. ‘Dora,’ she wrote, in an email to me the next day, ‘reminds me of how Bethany was at the same age. Beth has started to get more “grown up” and serious these days, but every now and again it all breaks loose like she can’t help herself.’

  It was the first time anyone had ever said to me that Dora reminded them of their child. It’s not that my daughter is an uncontrollable wild thing. She’s just exuberant, strong-minded, vocal, extrovert and determined. In most circumstances, this is a good thing.

  Jo Hawes called that evening to say they wanted to see Dora again. The audition was the following Tuesday, would take about two hours and would again be at the Really Useful offices. She needed to remember the dance Frank had taught them, her lines and the music. They were, Jo said, hoping to cast that day.

  ‘Sorry,’ I told Mrs Kendall on Monday morning. ‘She has to take tomorrow afternoon off. She’s been recalled again.’

  ‘She’s going to get a part, isn’t she?’

  ‘Um … well, er, I suppose …’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘Well, yes. She might well. We’ll probably know after tomorrow.’

  ‘How exciting!’

  The audition was at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, 11 July. We arrived at Really Useful’s offices with the customary apple, bottle of water and time to spare. Rachel had emailed to say that that Bethany hadn’t been recalled, which Dora and I were both a tad sad about, although, naturally, not quite as sad as Bethany had been. But, Rachel said, her disappointment had been short-lived: she’d been upset when first told, but by the next morning she’d bounced back and started to feel excited about the tap exam she was due to take the following week. ‘It’s always much more traumatic for the parents,’ Rachel told me. ‘The kids are straight on to the next thing, and we’re left reeling.’ You’d need, I thought, to be pretty tough to survive doing this on a regular basis. The more auditions, the more knockbacks. This could, I supposed, be character-forming: good preparation for the difficult realities of adult life. Or it could be confidence-destroying – and anyway, how early should kids start preparing for adult life? Should you protect them – as far as is parentally possible – from exposure to life’s cruelties, or should you allow them to experience, or at least know about, what can happen out there so they’re forewarned and forearmed?

  ‘I want to be prepared for adult life,’ said Dora, when I read her that last paragraph, a year and a half later. ‘Definitely. Can I start walking to school by myself? Now? When I’m in Year Four?’

  You would, I thought, as I recharged my Oyster card, also need plenty of time and cash. I hadn’t expected expenses to be reimbursed for early rounds of auditions – but then neither had I anticipated recharging my Oyster card quite so often. To be fair, I hadn’t given that side of it much consideration as I hadn’t thought beyond the first audition.

  We were amongst the first to arrive, and found a seat at the boardroom dining table from which I would be able to get a good look at everyone else coming in. As others arrived, I counted round and noticed that there were only six or seven potential Gretls. I figured Dora stood a fair chance, as they were looking for four or five of them. On the other hand, they were all slight, big-eyed, gazelle-like creatures, who looked delicate as glass next to my meteorite of a daughter.

  Adrianna – who we’d met at the first audition – was there with her parents, Darren and Shana. Dora attached herself to a slightly taller and, it turned out, quite a lot older girl called Yasmin and her mum, Wendy, an attractively trendy, laconically funny and down-to-earth woman, who worked at her daughter’s school as a teaching assistant. Dora left me, climbed on to Wendy’s lap and wrapped her arms around her neck. Nuzzling into her cheek, she skipped the whole ‘can I come to Yasmin’s house to play?’ stage and cut straight to the chase, asking hopefully if she could move in with them.

  There were also a set of twins, a minuscule but feisty and disturbingly strong five-year-old, who bounced around picking up children three times h
er size, a pair of Viking-blonde sisters – one Gretl-sized (competition!), one much bigger – whose mum, Jackie, I had a quick chat with, lots of older girls and nine or ten older boys, some of whom came in, slightly late, in a giggling horde of shiny, smart, well-behaved children, all dressed in the uniform of the Sylvia Young Theatre School. These were the last twenty-six children culled from the original thousand auditionees who’d queued outside the Palladium three months earlier. I apologised to Wendy for Dora’s forwardness. She laughed. In my (now extensive) experience, people don’t seem to mind too much when someone else’s child asks to come and live with them: I suppose it counts as a compliment. Although, of course, I don’t know what they say behind my back after we’ve left, about how terrible Dora’s home life must be for her to want to move in with complete strangers. Anyway, I expect it would only get really scary if she turned up on their doorstep at dusk, unannounced and unaccompanied, pulling her small purple wheelie suitcase with a smiling picture of Cinderella on it with one hand, and clutching her formerly white cuddly unicorn by the leg in the other.

  I looked around the room. She’s in with a good chance, I found myself thinking. Oh no she isn’t, I argued back at myself. They’ll take the skinny little ones. The Gretls will need to be picked up and carried. Dora is not, and has never been, fat, but she looks well constructed and feels even more solid than she looks. Once she hit five I could only carry her for very short distances, and only if she was riding piggy back. But, on the other hand, I’m not very strong. And they probably aren’t testing the kids for portability …

  I waved and shouted ‘good luck!’ as she joined the line of children being shepherded off, then started forcing myself to focus on how well she’d done to get this far, and tried to look forward to my first ever visit to New York.

  The atmosphere in the waiting area was noticeably more tense than it had been the previous week, or, in fact, during any of the earlier auditions. A couple of anxious fathers were pacing up and down, looking as if they were expecting their partners to give birth any minute. A quick glance around the room revealed that most of us mums seemed to have got our faces stuck. We formed a panorama of frozen little smiles hanging under unblinking terrified eyes: like a herd of meerkat trying to think up a polite way of introducing ourselves to an oncoming juggernaut. Our few attempts at conversation dwindled rapidly into silence, and only one or two brave or, possibly, seen-it-all-before types managed to concentrate on the newspapers they’d brought with them.

  A lot more noise emanated from the audition room this time, and none of it was angelic singing. One of the other mums told us that there was a window from the corridor outside the loo, through which, if you stood on tiptoe (small kids = short parents), you could see what was going on. It wasn’t exactly appropriate audition etiquette, but it was irresistibly tempting. I took a trip to the toilet. On my way out again – just as I was wondering whether I could summon the chutzpah to peer through the window (which, it turned out, had been papered over) – the door (also papered over) to the audition room swung open, and a young woman with a long, straight, white-blonde ponytail and a gentle smile ushered three small chattering girls out towards me. Through the doorway, I caught a glimpse of groups of kids sprawled on the floor, reading magazines, playing card games and talking while they waited.

  The door swung shut and, one by one, the girls went to the toilet. ‘How’s it going?’ I asked the young blonde woman who, I now knew, was ‘chaperoning’. ‘Oh, fine,’ she said, giving absolutely nothing away. Damn. Should have asked a better question.

  I went back to my seat at the table in the waiting area. The same mum who’d told us about the potential viewing window said that she thought Andrew Lloyd Webber himself was in there with the kids. ‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Did you see him?’

  ‘I think so,’ she said

  I fleetingly contemplated another trip to the loo so I could try to see if she was right, but decided against it, partly because I had an unaccustomed attack of inhibition, but mostly because I wasn’t that interested in catching a split-second view of Andrew Lloyd Webber himself. Discounting those teenage years during which – demonstrating either admirably catholic taste, or the disturbingly random impact of raging hormones – I was simultaneously besotted with David Bowie, Bob Geldof and David Coverdale (for the uninitiated, the very macho and hairy lead singer of Whitesnake and, before that, Deep Purple), I have never been either particularly starstruck, or any good at recognising celebrities. A few years ago, in the space of two weeks, I failed to recognise Bianca Jagger, Eddie Izzard and Jonathan Dimbleby at close quarters. Mr Dimbleby answered very politely when I asked him, over the plate of crisps I was offering, who he was and what he did for a living.

  It was a long two hours. There was no singing, and no knowing what was going on in there.

  Eventually the kids were let out. One older boy told his mother that he was pretty sure he hadn’t got a part as they’d shuffled the kids into families and he and a few others had been left sitting to the side.

  Dora came out smiley, but not as bouncy as on previous occasions.

  ‘It was a bit boring,’ she said. ‘We had to sit down doing nothing for lots of the time. And one of the girls was very rude.’

  ‘Rude?’ I asked, as we headed out the door.

  ‘Yes,’

  ‘What did she do that was rude?’

  ‘She said she has an oval face. But she hasn’t. Her face is round, so I said “Your face is round”, but she said “No it isn’t, it’s oval. My mum said.”’

  ‘So she said her face was oval when you think it’s round?’

  ‘Yes. But she was wrong. And she was very rude.’

  My attempt to explain the nature and purpose of tact – and of the difference between opinion and fact – simply did not compute. At that age, Dora hadn’t yet grasped the idea of either difference of opinion or white lies. There was simply the truth, which was good, and lies, which were bad. And very rude. ‘I’m hungry,’ she said, changing the subject.

  ‘Were you with her for a lot of the audition?’ I asked over fried egg, beans and chips – her treat of an early tea at the closest thing we could find to a greasy spoon in Covent Garden.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dora, baked bean sauce dripping from her chin.

  ‘What did you have to do this time? I didn’t hear any singing.’

  ‘I had to be Marta,’ she told me.

  ‘Not Gretl?’ I asked.

  ‘For some of the time at the beginning. I’ve had enough. Can I have an ice cream?’

  ‘Just eat a bit more of the egg white. And then you had to be Marta?’

  ‘Can I stop after one more mouthful? I had to say “I’m going to be seven on Tuesday and I want a pink parasol.”’

  ‘That’s nice,’ I said, my heart sinking. ‘So you got to say more lines. Did you get to be anyone else? Friedrich or Kurt?’

  ‘No, but they said maybe I could be Liesl next time. Can I have an ice cream?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, thinking, after Bethany’s experience, that this must be the end of the road. ‘Were you with the same group of children for most of the time, or did you change round?’

  ‘Most of the time but changed a bit. Can I have a chocolate ice cream?’

  ‘How many children were with you?’

  ‘Dunno. Can I have my ice cream now?’

  ‘In a minute. Was there anyone there called Andrew?’ I asked.

  ‘Andrew?’ she mused. ‘Hmmm. Yes.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘Nice. Can I have my ice cream now?’

  ‘Of course. You deserve a treat for getting to the final round. You’ve worked very hard learning singing and lines and dancing and done brilliantly well. Especially as it’s your first time. You won’t mind if you don’t get a part, will you?’ I asked, feeling that I might mind more than Dora.

  ‘No. I’ve done very well to get the last audition.’ My brainwashing had, evidently, proved successful. ‘But I migh
t get a part, mightn’t I? I’d like to be in it.’

  ‘Yes, you might. But if you don’t, we’ll go to New York and see Auntie Louise and Talya and have a fantastic time! Do you want to ring Daddy and tell him what it was like while you’re waiting for your ice cream?’ When, the previous September, Laurie and I had told Dora that we’d decided to get married, she had announced that, straight after the wedding, she’d start calling Laurie ‘Daddy’. And she did.

  I dialled his mobile and they chatted. Whilst half listening to Dora’s side of the conversation (just in case Laurie managed to extract more information from her than I had done), I mulled over how I’d take it if she fell at this, the final hurdle. Would I be able to conceal my disappointment from her? Would I actually be that disappointed? It would probably feel like we’d started off along the Yellow Brick Road, only to be dropped straight back into black and white Kansas before we’d had any proper adventures or even met a Munchkin. There would be compensations, though, even if these were just the comfort and familiarity of home and routine (well, as much routine as two freelancers and a child with an active social life can cobble together).

  Dora scraped the last drip of melted chocolate ice cream – ‘Don’t squish it all up like that.’ ‘I have to. I’m making ice cream soup’ – out of the little stainless steel bowl, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, at which point I noticed exactly how long and dirty her fingernails were. Then we made our way, hand in hand, humming ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ back to Covent Garden station, and travelled home. We counted the stops and talked about all the things we would do if she didn’t get a part, and all the things she wouldn’t be able to do if she did. We arrived at our house, fought our way past the piles of shoes, bikes, scooters and things that we’d sorted out to take to charity shops several months ago but hadn’t got round to taking, and flopped on to the sofa.