Stage Mum

by Lisa Gee

  Dora didn’t, and along with a gaggle of her friends started disembowelling the picnic hampers and sorting the real food from the fake by either taking bites out of it or throwing it at each other. There was a tall round table by the side of the picnic area and a group of us parents set up home there with our glasses of champagne and pretended we weren’t with our children. Food was served: small bowls of – you’ve guessed it – schnitzel with noodles. Canny catering that: one small bowl of schnitzel with noodles is, usually, enough. There was also sauerkraut and, apparently, crisp apple strudel, but I failed to spot that. There was plenty of champagne and glühwein but no Almdudler. Andrew Lloyd Webber had missed a trick there. Or perhaps not. I kept half an eye on Dora, who seemed to be enjoying herself loudly and uncontrollably, and realised that I should have brought my camera. Most of the other parents had. Unfortunately, there was no way I could have fitted one into the little beaded bag which was dangling open on my wrist, even if I’d left everything else out. There must be a way of being simultaneously elegant and well equipped. You probably need either staff or a tardis of a bag, like the one Hermione Granger has in the last Harry Potter book.

  Jane, John’s mum, and Lynn, Grace’s mum, came over. The opening night children had been photographed and interviewed by the press and hugged by Graham Norton, and their parents were now relaxed and basking in the reflected glory. But Jane was particularly excited about something else. ‘I snogged John Barrowman!’ she shrieked. ‘He said, “You’re a yummy mummy, aren’t you?”’ John (her son, that is) was only slightly embarrassed. Grace’s dad Patrick had managed to sneak in – along with all the other dads who’d wanted to come – and was lying low, in case he got caught gatecrashing. Adrianna’s dad Darren took a different tack. He had brought his camera and was working the room with his daughter, taking photos of her snuggled up to every available celebrity. There were a lot of celebrities. He took a lot of photos.

  Meanwhile Dora and her friend Alicia had got bored of dismantling the picnic and decided to ‘collect’ Marias from the How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? television programme, irrespective of whether or not they wanted to be collected. They shot off at a run, giggling, arms around each other’s shoulders. Brandishing an empty glass and toppling off my out-of-character high heels as my viscose pashmina flapped dishcloth-like in my wake, I hared off after the pair of them, taking my chaperoning duties very seriously. Their Maria quest saw them charging through the kitsch mini Alpine chalet, up and down the stairs, past the glühwein bar. I apologised a lot, not only to the Marias, but also to all the other guests the girls cannoned into during their single-minded high-speed chase. Most people smiled back at me, but not like they really meant it.

  I caught up with them when they were accosting Helena Blackman.

  ‘Do you two want to be Gretls?’ she asked them.

  ‘We are Gretls,’ they chorused back.

  ‘We won!’ they shrieked, having amassed a full set, and immediately decided to start all over again. The Marias’ smiles grew increasingly fixed each time they were ‘collected’. Eventually, after dragging poor Helena around for a while, they gave up and headed back to the picnic area, which was now being transformed into a dance floor. I was shattered. My feet hurt and the lining of my dress was hanging visibly below the bit you’re supposed to see. It was midnight, and although I had apologised to several famous people, I had only managed the odd snatched conversation with my friends. I had drunk one glass of champagne and eaten one bowl of schnitzel with noodles. It had been quite interesting, but perhaps I’m not really a party girl. Dora, on the other hand, evidently was, but by then she was demonstrating clear signs that she was about to turn into a pumpkin. There were tears for no reason, followed by dancing, followed by moaning collapse on my lap on the scatter cushions that had previously been part of the picnic scene and were now piled into a small Alpine range that some of the other children, still full of energy and, probably, Coke, were scaling and jumping off. I hoped she’d last until the cab was due to arrive, but had my doubts.

  At a quarter to one, after a quick chat with Helen, we decided to go and wait in the lobby. Molly-May was still awake and functioning, but Dora was exhausted and behaving exactly as you would expect an overtired, over-excited six-year-old kept up hours past her bedtime to behave. I called the cab company and the driver told us he’d be there in twenty minutes. I sat on the floor. Dora fell asleep, grumbling, on top of me, while I watched people (including Graham Norton) leave and lost all sensation in my legs. I didn’t dare move them in case I woke Dora. Twenty minutes later, wondering where he’d got to, I called the cab driver. He had got to New Billingsgate Market, which was miles away from where we were at Old Billingsgate Market, which he didn’t know how to get to from where he was.

  This was not good. I realised that I should have learned my lesson and not used that cab company after our honeymoon experience, when their driver arrived late and, en route to Stansted airport, tried to drive us in completely the wrong direction round the North Circular Road, whilst simultaneously sweating profusely, fondling a stripy towel and muttering strange incantations to himself before announcing that he didn’t have enough petrol to get us there anyway.

  After another fifteen minutes had passed and the driver still didn’t know where he was, let alone where we were, we gave up and decided to try and catch a black cab outside. This was easier said than done, as Dora was no longer remotely compos mentis, my legs were numb and there were 300 other, more nimble party guests also intent on flagging down taxis. We had a long, cold, miserable wait, but after much moaning and wailing, and many fruitless attempts, managed to find a cab driver who took pity on us and drove us home to bed.

  The following morning we woke late, but keen to see what the reviews of the show would be like. Dora was particularly excited about seeing the pictures of her friends in the newspapers, so we popped to the corner shop and checked through a few of them. Leafing through The Guardian, I was surprised to find, on page five, a photo not of the opening night team, but of Kettles and Dora – more of the same that had been appearing in the papers since the press shoot the previous week. My inner stage mother was delighted, but the rest of me wasn’t. We checked through some more newspapers. Same thing. It wasn’t fair.

  There are all kinds of issues around PR with children in the theatre that don’t apply to adults – and that’s even before you get on to the advisability or otherwise of turning children into celebrities. The most difficult of these for the people managing the press relations is the fact that whereas an adult role is undertaken by one person, a child’s part is shared between several. This is not something that’s easy for a media that aims to simplify everything into soundbites. They can’t use three – or even four – photos or film clips to illustrate one review, so either one child becomes publicly identified with a role, which is often what happens, and the others end up feeling like second-tier performers, and relationships between them (and between their families) deteriorate, or journalists get confused and end up using pictures of one child to illustrate a story about another. Which is what happened on Newsnight Review when they were discussing Adrianna’s performance and the subsequent press coverage. To demonstrate exactly what the panel were talking about – and how good Adrianna’s performance was – they showed some electronic press kit footage of Dora singing their ‘So Long, Farewell’ solo.

  So, instant dilemma. If you’re responsible for the show’s PR, do you ignore the children’s sensibilities and give one team, the team that opens the show, all the exposure, or do you try and share the custard more fairly? On The Sound of Music, the company went for the fairer, sharing approach, but this carried its own problems. Mittens and Adrianna did opening night, but to anyone who hadn’t been there, because Kettles and Dora had done the press shoot and the electronic press kit, it looked as if they had. And what about the other children, the Geese team, Alicia and Lauren?

  Jo Hawes had warned us on the morning we
took our kids to the Really Useful offices to get sorted into teams that the Gretls would get the most attention. But none of us realised quite how much attention until the day after the opening night, when the articles about Adrianna started to appear. After I’d dropped Dora off at the theatre for her rehearsal, I started noticing the billboards in front of the Evening Standard newsstands. They read ‘The Sound of Music’s 7-year-old Star’. My stomach lurched with what might possibly have been envy. Then I bought a copy of the paper. Adrianna’s photo was on the front, next to a headline about Prince Charles telling his staff to ride bicycles. She looked cute, clever and beautiful. The caption read: ‘Girl aged 7 who is making a brilliant Sound of Music …’, and in smaller text, ‘Triumph: Adrianna Bertola, aged seven, is being hailed a star today after her first night performance in The Sound of Music.’

  On page three was a sweet article, with a picture of Adrianna standing in front of ‘so proud’ parents Darren and Shana (‘at home today after she stole the show at The Sound of Music alongside Connie Fisher and Lesley Garrett’), two of her costumed up for earlier, local to where she lived, performances: in one she was dressed as a bee (aged four), in the other as a princess ballerina (aged five). In the fourth photo, she was shown taking her triumphant first-night bow with Connie Fisher, Lesley Garrett and Alexander Hanson. As I read, feelings that definitely weren’t envy started bubbling up inside me. Foremost amongst these was relief that it hadn’t been Dora on that stage on the opening night and that it wasn’t her and us on page three of the Evening Standard. Although I read the article and thought ‘how nice for them’, I was aware that I would have felt it too exposing. I also wouldn’t want my child hailed as a star that young – that would feel like tempting fate to treat her in the same way that it has treated so many child stars over the decades. I wouldn’t want anyone to say that she stole the show from the adult cast, let alone see her singled out from the friends who were on stage with her, or who were playing von Trapp children on other nights. I wouldn’t want journalists coming to my house, taking photos of me looking strained amidst our characteristic untidiness (just to be clear, Adrianna’s parents didn’t look remotely strained and neurotic: Shana looked perfect and Darren looked proud, and their house, I know, always looks spickly and spanly clean and tidy), and then calling social services because everything was so messy, dirty and generally unhygienic. Perhaps I just feel like I have more to hide …

  Incidentally, in case you think I’m protesting too much, I will admit to being deeply envious that Adrianna was picked for the cast recording and Dora wasn’t. And that means me, not the stage mother within. She would, obviously, have loved Dora to be on the receiving end of all the attention that Adrianna and her family were getting, and secretly fantasised about having her photo in the paper too. I, on the other hand, would happily have traded all the pictures of Dora in the press and the electronic press kit video for the sound of her voice on the CD, but it wasn’t to be. Actually, I’d have loved all the children to have been on the CD: it would have sounded gorgeous and been a fabulous memory for us all.

  But production companies don’t decide which child is going to do what on the basis of what their mothers would like, and nor should they. I swallowed my disappointment and reminded myself that Dora was only six years old and really didn’t need to be on a CD.

  The next day (Friday), Adrianna’s photo was on the front page of the Daily Mail and then on Saturday the paper ran a long feature on her, complete with more photographs. Adrianna seemed more or less unaffected by all the attention. By the weekend, Shana said she was finding it all a bit much, but didn’t feel she could say no as it was all good publicity for the show. On Sunday, she phoned and then she and Darren sent an email round, apologising for Saturday’s Mail article. It had, apparently, offended some of the other parents. I hadn’t read it, so wasn’t remotely offended. Nor was I after reading it, although it was quite clear that, despite it being perfectly complimentary about Adrianna, it didn’t portray her parents quite as kindly as it could have done. They had, Shana and Darren told us, been thoroughly misquoted.

  On the Friday, when Newsnight Review covered the show, Martha Kearney talked about how The Sound of Music had moved her to projectile crying. Both Mark Kermode and Paul Morley admitted to ‘manly moisture’. Morley – to his credit, the only person reviewing the show to raise concerns about the way the entertainment business and the media use children – also commented that ‘When the little girl comes out, I’m on the verge of walking out, really. Because you can see the next few days. She’s going to get as much [publicity] as the leading lady. No! Please don’t do that to us.’

  I emailed Paul, asking him to elaborate on his comments.

  ‘This was a reaction to the fact that the whole production, and the search for Maria, after all that, was going to sink under basic, perspective-shattering cuteness, and then the tragic fallout that seems to come with the child performer. Also, there was just a hint of something a little unsavoury, the inevitability that the little girl was going to be hyped and glamorised in the newspapers in a way that doesn’t seem quite right, and has nothing to do with talent or dreams.’

  He continued: ‘I wasn’t really ready for it on the night, because I was just thinking of the Maria, of how this had been a new way of finding the adult star. As soon as the little one performed all her moves so perfectly and sang with such conscientiousness, I felt cornered by the … cuteness … and by the sure knowledge that even if it ended more Drew Barrymore or Aled Jones than Lena Zavaroni or Jack Wilde, it would still not be a very normal story. Perhaps that’s what it was – in the middle of something quite middle-of-the-road, something definitely designed for all the family, there was this hint of something abnormal, and there is something abnormal about encouraging children to work inside such a factory, inside such a money-making organisation.’

  Also, reviewing a show centred around children presents particular issues. ‘How could we be negative about the production when there were such keen, confident kids at the heart of it? It’s like using children – even though there is no way around it, because this show needs kids – creates a kind of immunity. However poor the show might be … there was this sense that whatever else was going on, the cute factor, the near showbiz miracle of seeing really young children get everything right, would dominate any emotional reaction. You end up not watching a grown-up piece of musical theatre, but falling for the little ones.’

  My suspicion is that had the production been poor, had Connie Fisher not been great in her role, it wouldn’t have been so easy to fall for the little ones.

  From what I’ve seen, read and researched, even in those instances where the child is acting out something that would be illegal or terrible in real life, it’s not the actual acting part that’s damaging to a child performer. That can – as it was for the kids on The Sound of Music – be both enormous fun and a superb learning experience. It’s the attendant publicity, the individual’s growing attachment to media attention and the public’s perception of them that have, time and again, proved destructive. It’s hard enough coping with fame when you’re grown up. No one should have to deal with it when they’re still too young to cook their own dinner.

  ‘Doing the work,’ says Mark Williams-Thomas, ‘is the fun bit, the bit that’s not exploitative. It’s all the rest that goes with it. That becomes exploitation. There is now no cutoff between adult and child. As long as a child’s parents say yes, they are interviewed and spoken to in the same way as an adult would be.’ It’s the way the kids are featured in newspapers, magazines and television programmes designed to be read or watched by adults. ‘They are,’ says Mark, ‘in quite a vulnerable position, because they are entering an adult’s world.’ Paul Morley concurs. ‘As soon as child performers are commented on in a grown-up context, they become grown-ups, they’re in the same competitive zone.’

  In some senses, we’ve come a long way since Noel Coward, commenting on a stage production of Gon
e With the Wind, recommended cutting both the second act and the child actress’s throat. Most journalists these days try to be kind to the children they write about. At least while they’re children. When they hit their late teens, it’s open season. ‘Having warped their entire character by indiscriminately celebrating them when they were too young,’ says Paul Morley, ‘we abuse them when they cannot cope with the pressure, and the strangeness, and the fact that they were famous before they really knew what that meant.’

  It’s a tough call because on one level it’s nobody’s fault. It’s not like an evil entity is sitting in the wings, cackling, twiddling its moustache and planning to destroy the innocence of defenceless children. When kids go out on stage to perform professionally, they do so because they want to, because they love doing it. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t get the job in the first place: to win a part, as well as lots of luck, you need talent and, crucially, enthusiasm. And it’s partly because the children on stage are innocently and enthusiastically enjoying themselves that people in the audience get an entirely innocent pleasure from watching them. It’s also natural for the people who watch these children doing something fantastic on stage to feel curious about them, to want to know what they’re like. It’s also natural for the media to want to celebrate talent and innocent enthusiasm. After all, talent and innocent enthusiasm (not to mention hard work) should be celebrated, just not indiscriminately. It is, I think, the ultimately cruel lack of discrimination that implicates us all, collectively – however innocent we may be as individuals – in the failure to protect these children. There should be boundaries. For starters, headline writers could stop describing performing children as ‘stars’.