Stage Mum

by Lisa Gee

  ‘Were you?’ the couple asked.

  ‘Not us, the children.’

  ‘Can we have your autographs?’

  ‘Not us, them.’

  ‘Which one were you? Liesl? Can we take your photos?’

  The mums gave in, signed their autographs and posed for pictures.

  I enjoyed Dora’s second night more than her first, partly because I cried less and my contact lenses stayed transparent throughout, which meant I could actually see the show, but also because I was much less anxious. Dora was obviously enjoying the whole experience. ‘I was so nervous, I nearly threw up before we marched on that first time!’ she’d announced bouncily on the way home from her West End debut. It was perfectly clear from her untroubled cheerfulness and her first ever use of the phrase ‘threw up’ that she was simply parroting what some of the older kids had said and hadn’t felt remotely nauseous. She might, I conceded, have had slight butterflies, but the idea of ‘stage fright’ was, for her, evidently oxymoronic, and so I assumed she was unlikely to suffer a paralysing second-night bout of it. And I knew – objectively – that the show was terrific, that you didn’t need to actually be related to someone on stage to be utterly entranced.

  Tuesday night found me sitting with my sister Nikki, brother-in-law Richard, my niece and nephew Millie and Freddie (aged five and three respectively) and my father (aged seventy-three) right at the back of the gods. It gave me a completely different perspective from the previous night. On the up side, you get a much better overall view of the action, a much better sense of how everyone and everything on stage – people, scenery, props – jigsaw together to create the whole effect: it’s more like watching a film. On the down side, from where we were sitting, when Maria first appeared behind the oval window in the curtain, it looked as if she’d been decapitated. But as it was only a matter of seconds before the curtain was raised, this didn’t spoil our fun. And even three-year-old Freddie sat happily through the two-hour show, thumb in mouth, index finger up nose, occasionally extracting them to point and shout, ‘Look! Dorwa!’, which ensured that everyone sitting near us soon knew that we were connected to someone on stage.

  When other people in the audience find out that you’ve got a child in the show, nine times out of ten their response is ‘You must be so proud.’ Even though the standard reply is to nod equivocally, laugh and say, ‘S/he is having a very nice time,’ one or two mums were irritated to distraction. ‘If one more person says that to me …’ fumed one, through gritted teeth. But it’s the natural response. Except that it isn’t exactly pride that you feel. I felt proud when, one day, waiting in the school playground for the bell to ring, I overheard Dora stick up for a friend of hers who was being teased by some other children. I felt proud of her when another mother at school told me that her daughter had said that Dora was always kind. I felt proud of her when, despite going out to work two nights a week at the age of six and not getting to bed until eleven o’clock at night, she still knuckled down at school and also got her homework done. I didn’t feel proud of her for doing something that felt, to her, like the most fun she could possibly have, ever.

  What I did feel when I saw her on stage was different and also had the potential to be more damaging to our relationship. Pride in your child is something you feel partly because of your closeness – and your proprietorial relationship – to her. The awe and wonder you experience as you watch her singing, dancing and acting her little heart out up there in front of the audience that you are part of are distancing. On the one hand, this can help you step back from your child and view her as an individual in her own right, rather than as a mini-me (or mini-you). But it can also tempt and encourage you to put your child on a pedestal, to see her as – and treat her as if she is – more grown-up, more worldly-wise than she can possibly be.

  It is, in fact, very easy to forget that these small people, who’ve learned their lines, music and moves, and are strutting their stuff on stage with the confidence of seasoned professionals, are, in real life, children. That although, because they are good at what they do and are being paid, they can be described as actors, actresses, singers and/or dancers, a child’s real job is – to paraphrase what Lizzie Maguire’s mum says during one episode of the children’s comedy series – to hang out with friends, do well at school, and be good. There’s a big difference between treating a child as an individual and allowing her all the rights, privileges and responsibilities of adulthood – especially when she’s only halfway between nappies and puberty. But in circumstances like these, it’s a fine line to locate and keep on the right side of. You don’t have to be an evil pushy stage mother, Machiavellianly planning your six-year-old’s ascendance to superstardom to end up on the wrong side of it. Being temporarily dazzled will do just fine. Or simply enjoying the guilty pleasures of reflected glory a little too much. After all, spotlights can feel too bright and exposing. How much more pleasant just to bathe in the gentle light of the moon, instead of the fierce burn of the sun. Especially when that someone else is your child and you can, almost legitimately, claim some of the credit. After all, if your child’s doing something that brilliant, you must have done something right, mustn’t you?

  Nancy Carlsson-Paige – a child psychologist and professor at Lesley University in Massachusetts, who also happens to be Matt Damon’s mother – told me that she feels there are risks to sending children into the entertainment business at a young age, some of which are down to parental attitude. ‘Honestly, I often observe that the motive to do this lies more with adults than with children. What kids want to do is play creatively and this is their best foundation for going into the creative arts later on. I do know that some kids have a wonderful time being in plays and seem to thrive doing it. I hope when this happens such children also get a lot of time creating their own characters, scripts and scenarios in imaginative play.’ Dora certainly did: to the amusement of the chaperones and some of the older kids, she and Molly-May devised their own ‘horror film’, called Greenaway.

  But a firm line needed to be drawn between backstage playtime and backstage work time – and when you’re six years old, it’s not one that’s easy to recognise. When he brought the children out after Dora’s second preview performance, Russ took me aside. There was a problem. Towards the end of the show, there was a tricky scene change to negotiate, when the children had precisely sixteen seconds to come off stage, change out of one costume into another, and file back on again. It was a tense moment. And Dora had been bouncing around excitedly, delaying the process unacceptably. The dressers – under pressure to get six kids and three adults changed in an impossibly short time – were, understandably, not happy. Could I, Russ wanted to know, have a quiet word?

  On the way home, I asked her what had happened. ‘Mummy. It was brilliant! On the quick change, we all did it in the right order!’ she shouted excitedly. ‘Liesl first, then Friedrich and me last!’ I understood. She had wanted the von Trapp children to be ready for their next entry in age order – which meant she had to be last and had done what she could to slow her dresser down. Exactly the kind of thing that would feel thrilling to a child that age, but completely inappropriate in the circumstances. I had a lot of sympathy for her point of view and so explained gently:

  ‘They need you to stand still. Otherwise you might be late for the concert scene.’

  She didn’t want to be late.

  Not only do the children have to behave in a very grown-up way, but they are also catapulted into what is, very much, an adult world. That doesn’t mean that they’re suddenly surrounded by shocking levels of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll – at least not when they’re working on The Sound of Music. But it does mean that they’re spending a lot of time around adults, going about their business in an adult way. This has its moments. ‘Mummy,’ Dora said seriously, during a morning walk to school, ‘once while we were rehearsing, me and Liesl and Brigitta come in and Uncle Max is supposed to say “We’re in the Salzburg Festival”, b
ut he said the F word. He said “We’re in the F-u-k-i-n-g [sic] Festival.” Then we skipped straight to “The Hills are Alive”.’ She was slightly shocked but, mostly, amused. ‘Naughty Uncle Max,’ I replied, only just restraining myself from correcting her spelling. Nothing much out of the ordinary there: Dora had already heard plenty of swear words and showed no inclination to repeat them. But it did get me thinking. Not every show is as upliftingly innocent as The Sound of Music and not all chaperones as good, as on–the-ball, funny and compassionate as Russ and his team. What happens to kids who are working on shows or films that they’re not old enough to be allowed to watch themselves? Where there are no other children working with them?

  While Dora and her friends were prancing around being cute and Austrian, over in the US, twelve-year-old child star Dakota Fanning was filming Hounddog. Her role included portraying the victim in a rape scene. Paul Petersen of A Minor Consideration contends that ‘for a gifted child actor asked to portray a difficult, emotionally loaded scene, over time there is NO difference between reality and pretend’. That is, the child may appreciate the difference between acting and reality while she’s acting the scene out, but later on the memories of filming will become jumbled up with the memories of having watched the finished movie, and with the audience reaction to it. Before Hounddog was released, despite the director’s insistence that the scene was filmed bit by bit rather than in one take, done sensitively, and that the child was wearing a bodysuit and had her parents’ consent, Petersen condemned it. He wrote on A Minor Consideration’s website that it was likely that Fanning would fetch up with ‘memories’ of being raped: memories which would be reinforced by the way people responded to the images of her being violated during the film: ‘The internal workings of a child on the threshold of womanhood who has been raped … and raped for public con sumption … cannot be predicted, nor can her encounters with people exposed to that image be guaranteed to be in any way “uplifting”.’

  There’s quite a sophisticated argument going on here, one that separates the making of the work from the finished product and marks a clear division between the way the child actor is treated during the creative process and the way in which they are seen, by themselves and, crucially, by their audience, afterwards. It’s not such an issue in stage work, where what the audience gets to watch is the creative process, the realism is tempered by the medium and the images only last as long as the production. But with film and television it’s different. A child can be treated fantastically during filming, and not be remotely troubled by the experience of making something quite hard-hitting. That doesn’t mean they’ll be able to cope with watching themselves in the finished product. But even assuming they can, that they are clever enough to differentiate a realistic on-screen illusion from off-screen reality, and aren’t adversely affected by their involvement, that doesn’t mean that their audience will be able to do the same.

  ‘That’s the downstream day of reckoning,’ Petersen told me. ‘It’s one thing to participate in a project that has an edge to it. It is entirely possible to have a child in a highly charged emotional scene and, in terms of the work, the kid gets through the day. They know the adults are not really mad, they’re not really screaming and the child’s not in fear of their life. The water may just roll off your child’s back. But what doesn’t roll off the back is the way the audience suddenly perceives you. When the audience sees it, their reaction, and subsequent dealings with the real child, is what changes.’ Look at the men who stalked Jodie Foster and Brooke Shields – the former shooting Ronald Reagan, the latter plaguing his victim for twenty years before he was caught. And much more recently, the Afghani boys who were chosen from 2,000 Kabul schoolchildren to appear in the film of The Kite Runner have had to be relocated to the United Arab Emirates for their own safety. Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada, whose character is raped, has claimed that he and his family weren’t told about the shocking, though not explicit, scene in advance and feared attacks or kidnap attempts if the film was shown in Afghanistan. He and his family are worried that people in the audience will believe that he really was raped. There are also concerns that showing a Hazara boy being raped by a Pashtun will inflame ethnic tensions. The film company, whilst insisting the content of the film was fully explained, has arranged and paid for the move and is putting the children and their parents and guardians up in luxury hotels until they can be found more permanent accommodation. They are unlikely to be able to return to Afghanistan in the near future.

  Shirley Temple famously made her film debut in the Baby Burlesks, hour-long parodies of grown-up movies, with all roles played by pre-school children, clothed waist up in adult dress, waist down in oversize nappies. Titles included Polly Tix in Washington – the story of a call girl attempting to corrupt an honest politician. Today the makers would almost certainly be arrested on kiddie porn charges – if not for child cruelty: small actors and actresses who misbehaved were shut in a big dark box with only an enormous block of melting ice to sit on. In her autobiography, Miss Temple Black describes the films as ‘a cynical exploitation of our childish innocence and … occasionally racist or sexist’. Aside from Marilyn Granas, who became Miss Temple’s studio standin, used for setting up shots, until her mother refused to bleach her dark hair to match Shirley’s, none of the other children are known to have gone on to other acting roles. Miss Temple turned out just fine. But one wonders about her co-stars.

  The fact that both Dakota Fanning and Shirley Temple were supported by their parents when they appeared in what were, arguably, entirely unsuitable ventures is not that surprising. Mrs Temple Black explains that the producers of the Baby Burlesks made all kinds of promises to her mother – about the nature of the films, the professional training she would be given and the care she would receive. ‘Mother,’ she explains, ‘had no cause to disbelieve the promises nor presume a mean-spirited character to the films.’1 Russ told me that when he’s been chaperoning on film and television sets, children attended by their mum or dad are often given permission, by their parents, to continue working beyond their legal hours, even when they’re exhausted. Parents are less likely to be willing to stand their ground against a production company than a professional chaperone, because they worry that they’ll be perceived as difficult and affect their child’s chances of getting more work. Also, we get carried away.

  On the way home after her second performance, I asked Dora if they’d filmed the show, as they had been scheduled to do, for the electronic press kit, and also if they’d had their photos taken the day before. I’d imagined that with the change of leading man, this would be delayed until Alexander Hanson was up and running. I was wrong. Photos had been taken on the Monday, and they’d filmed earlier that afternoon with Alexander Hanson (Christopher Dickins was still being Captain von Trapp that evening). ‘We had to smile more when they were filming,’ said Dora, ‘and look at the camera instead of where we’re usually supposed to look.’

  ‘Where do you usually have to look?’

  ‘Lots of places.’

  The rest of that week was comparatively quiet. Dora was only needed to rehearse on Saturday; otherwise, she wasn’t required until the following Monday, when she was back on stage. I didn’t book tickets for her third performance: I wanted to watch the show more than a few times, but definitely not every day she was on. However fabulous it was – and like thousands of other audience members, I was genuinely, deliciously swept up in it – too many viewings and not only would I have to declare myself bankrupt, but the magic would undoubtedly pall. Faced with boredom, my brain turns pedantic, which can be as inappropriate as jumping up and down excitedly while a frustrated dresser is trying to get you changed. It was okay when Dora was young and we watched TV together and I became expert at spotting continuity errors in Bear in the Big Blue House, but I really didn’t want to find myself analysing the differences between the plot of The Sound of Music and the true story of the von Trapps. Or trying to work out the mathematics of making a
theatre carbon neutral. Or deconstructing ‘The Lonely Goatherd’. The whole Sound of Music experience felt enchanted and I wanted to keep it that way.

  That said, my inner stage mother was having the time of her life and didn’t want to miss a single moment. She was stamping her foot on several of my vital organs and complaining bitterly at my failure to fork out for a front-row ticket for every single performance starring Dora Gee as Gretl. She wanted to be right up by the stage, wearing a t-shirt with GRETL’S GREAT AND I’M HER MUM! emblazoned across it in huge dayglo letters, whilst clutching a programme held permanently open to display Dora’s photograph, which she would spend every interval shoving up the nose of anyone lucky enough to be sitting near her, whilst booming out, ‘That’s MY daughter up there. The littlest one. Isn’t she cute? Isn’t she just the best thing about the show? Yes, she is fantastic, isn’t she? Yes, I am proud – it’s like a little bit of me up on the stage.’ But I kept her firmly under control. Most of the time.

  During this quieter, calmer time, we mums started discussing what we were going to wear to the first-night party. I am not good at clothes. When I was a child my mother used to despair at the speed with which any outfit she dressed me in ‘came apart at the middle’, my hair’s refusal to do anything neatly girlie and the fact that one of my knee-length socks would, inevitably, hang gaping around my ankle, revealing a tragically hairy shin. Since my late teens I have been the humble recipient of a stream of hand-me-ups from my much more style-aware younger sister (in fact I’m sitting here writing in one of her cast-off cardis, and very nice it is too). Not being under any illusions about my ability to dress for such an occasion without significant guidance, I emailed Jo: ‘For the sartorially hopeless amongst us (i.e., me), is there a dress code for press night/the party?’ She replied that she hadn’t seen the invitations yet, but thought it would be ‘quite posh’.