Stage Mum (15 page)

Soon after 4.30, an email arrived from Jo, providing a rehearsal schedule for the rest of the week. Dora was due to be there Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday afternoons and Saturday morning. I dutifully emailed through the details to Dora’s school even though everything was ‘subject to change, of course’, and a little later I packed my laptop away and moseyed back to the Jerwood. I hadn’t got through half the work I’d planned to, but I’d started to get to know some of the other stage mums, and been pleasantly surprised. None of them seemed to be the viciously competitive, fiercely pushy, cheerfully two-faced, hissy-fit-prone types I’d been expecting. Of course, this was only the first rehearsal, and it was possible that they were all just very good at being two-faced … As Russ commented, eyes twinkling, ‘Oh, you’re all good friends now. But we’ll see when they pick the kids for the opening night. That’s when the true colours come out.’

Early back, I strolled round looking at the artwork on display, and picked up an information sheet about them, which I didn’t read. Soon, other parents arrived, and we sat and waited in the glazed café area, some making small talk, others reading newspapers.

Then Russ and Rebecca brought the kids out. ‘I’m hungry,’ said Dora, who was struggling with her backpack, lunch bag, jacket and two thick manuscripts whilst simultaneously trying to hold Molly-May’s hand. ‘Can I go to Molly-May’s house?’ Realising that I’d only given her the same amount of food as when she went to school, I was hit by a sudden pang of guilt. Usually by this time she’d also have demolished a snacky tea (
if
she’d eaten all the healthy food in her lunch box) and be asking what was for supper. I wrestled the wodges of paper into her backpack. ‘We need to put them in a file. And I have to bring a pencil and a rubber so I can make notes,’ she told me. I
promised
her something for the journey home, hoping that would distract her from her request for a play-date, which I completely ignored. We walked back to Southwark station with a few of the other kids (back under the overhanging building, me controlling my anxiety), said goodbye, then crossed over The Cut to find a snack.

On the train on the way home I looked at the manuscripts – script and score – and asked Dora about what had happened. I found out that they’d all been in a big room, and Andrew Lloyd Webber (who had really been there this time) and David Ian had welcomed them and shown them some pictures of what the stage would look like. ‘But we’re not allowed to tell you because it’s a secret.’ Then they’d started on the songs. It had all been very exciting, except that someone had been wearing the same trousers as Dora.

After making a round of phone calls to let people know how the first day had gone, I stayed up late that night browsing the script and looking at the musical score. An email from Jo Hawes arrived at twenty past midnight, saying that the following day’s rehearsal would finish half an hour earlier than she’d previously told us, confirming Dora’s need of pencil and rubber (I thought she’d better take two pencils and a sharpener as well, and also another rubber) and asking us to make sure that the children arrive at the rehearsal ‘having eaten so that they can give their best to the job in hand. Also,’ Jo added, ‘looking ahead, when we are in the theatre and they are coming in for an evening show, it is really important that they have a decent meal in between school and arriving at the theatre. They will fill up on junk otherwise and that is not a good way to do a performance.’ Quite.

Next day, Dora had school in the morning and I picked her up before lunch to make sure she ate a proper, balanced meal. And then, ring-bindered script and score, pencils, rubber and sharpener in her back pack, laptop and
Harry Potter
in mine, we trundled off to the Jerwood Space. The noise in the glasshouse seating area was even louder that afternoon – some of the children already knew each other
from
school or previous theatre performances, but those that didn’t had started to make friends and were chatting and laughing noisily with them. Or playing tag and shrieking in happy disregard of all the Jerwood Space’s other customers. A few of us headed off to Café Arlington together for a drink, a gossip and a laugh, and I managed to squeeze in a token stab at some work.

That afternoon, another email from Jo, confirming the following day’s rehearsal. On Wednesday (same routine), three emails. The first confirmed Thursday’s times, the second had, in the subject field, ‘A whinge from Jo!!’ Oh no! What had I done wrong? What had Dora done wrong? Was there a packed lunch problem? Had she bitten someone? Had I bitten someone without realising? No. It turned out that Jo was cross because a couple of the parents with older children in the production had asked if their kids could be allowed to make their own way home. These teenagers were accustomed to travelling long distances to and from school, as well as embarking on all kinds of solo adventures in their spare time. But whatever degree of freedom young people are permitted in normal circumstances, it’s different when they’re working in the entertainment industry, under licence. Then it’s against the law for them to travel alone. If, Jo pointed out, she and the chaperones allowed any of the kids to slope off by themselves and got caught in the process, it could lead to all the licences being revoked ‘and bingo – Captain von Trapp has no children!’ Which would, obviously, be a bad thing.

The third email told us that Saturday’s rehearsal would last all day, instead of just the morning as we’d been told. The children would be singing in the morning and blocking in the afternoon. Very nice, but ‘blocking’? What was ‘blocking’? It sounded more like rugby than musical theatre … I emailed Jo. Blocking, it turns out, means staging. Oh, right. I adjusted my diary and added a new word to my lexicon of theatrical jargon.

Thursday, same routine: school, lunch, journey,
Harry Potter
, noisy wait at the Jerwood, coffee at the Arlington, followed by a halfhearted
attempt
at getting on with the research and report-writing I was supposed to be doing. The trouble was, everything else going on around me was so much more interesting. Even Café Arlington, with its own art gallery and its community projects. Concentrating on what I was supposed to be doing wasn’t easy. Still, there was always Friday, when Dora’s team weren’t in, she would do her first full school day of the week and I would have a whole day at home to catch up on my work. And things like washing, shopping and spending time with my husband. With a little bit of luck – and an impressive amount of multitasking – I could fit all of that in between nine and three thirty. In my dreams.

Jo’s email arrived at six o’clock, with the subject line ‘Lots of things – sit down with a drink!’, but I didn’t. She confirmed Friday’s rehearsal times. The following week there would be rehearsals every day from ten in the morning until eight at night. The children wouldn’t be required all the time – that would be illegal – but Jo thought the timetable would be very different from the first week. Also, we or our agents (Dora was one of the minority who didn’t have one), might be contacted by the BBC, who would be making a documentary about Connie and filming during rehearsals. And – because the show was likely to finish ‘the wrong side of 10 p.m.’, the performance schedule had to be two days on, four days off, in order to comply with child labour laws. So it would look like this

The Gretls, because four of them were being divided into three teams, would be dancing to a different beat, one that was yet to be decided. Jo was planning to do a draft schedule for everyone else, which would exclude the first couple of weeks, because it would be a while before the creative team decided which team – and which Gretl – would be performing on press night. This meant that everyone apart from those with Gretls in the show would soon be able to book tickets, at least for their children’s later performances, but we wouldn’t.

And finally:

We have been asked by the Jerwood Space to ask you all not to take the children into the Glasshouse while you are waiting for the chaperones if you arrive early. If you would all wait just inside the main entrance doors that would be great. Also on Saturday the building itself does not open until 10 a.m. so if you arrive early please don’t think that you have got it wrong and that the rehearsal has been cancelled.

Later on the Friday, another email arrived from Jo, this one asking us to provide our kids with a small tape recorder so that they could record the music. Great, I thought, after begging Laurie to let Dora use his old Sony handheld tape recorder. I’ll be able to find out what’s going on.

We were early on Saturday, Dora was desperate for the loo, and the Jerwood wasn’t yet open. Fortunately, the pub across the road was, and the woman behind the bar let me sneak Dora in for a quick visit. Most of the parents headed home to enjoy a slightly quieter
than
usual day with the rest of their families. A couple stayed up to shop. As Laurie – being a children’s party entertainer – works most weekends, I headed off, with my trusty laptop, to the Arlington. Much to my dismay, it was closed. Situated as it is in the midst of officeville, Café Arlington doesn’t do Saturdays. I wandered up to the South Bank to find an alternative.

On Sunday, I sat down with Dora and listened to some of the rehearsal recordings. The singing parts were cute, and whilst they didn’t actually make me feel like I was in a privileged fly-on-the-wall position, they did give me at least the sense of being an ear at the door. ‘That’s me!’ said Dora, when it came to her part. ‘That’s Molly-May. That’s Adrianna. That’s Emily.’ ‘What I want to try and stress today,’ I heard Ros, the children’s music director, tell the von-Trapps-to-be during a run-through of ‘Edelweiss’, ‘is that you don’t have to sing loudly all of the time. It’s all about emotion in this piece, isn’t it?’ There were parts that just sounded like a lot of muttering. From what I could tell, Frank, the children’s director, was working out a scene with them: ‘Let’s walk and talk it through,’ I heard him say. ‘Molly-May, show me your curtsey. And you, Dora.’

‘Were you supposed to record this?’ I asked Dora. ‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘But we weren’t doing any singing.’ She also seemed to have accidentally taped lunchtime, but at a distance, so all I could hear were muffled voices and doors slamming, followed by a discussion of Christmas, which seemed to be dominated by Dora shrieking about her visit to Santa Claus at Brent Cross Shopping Centre, and finding an orange in her stocking. I could hear Russ’s voice, but not what he was saying, and then one of the boys announced that they’d just had surround-sound installed and it was ‘wow’. I strained my ears to try and catch something revealing, but to no avail.

Over the next few weeks, we settled into an all-consuming, haphazard kind of routine. Dora would be rehearsing four out of five weekday afternoons and generally all day Saturday. We parents – okay, almost exclusively the mums – would sit there nattering.
Within
a few days, we had bonded. We were routinely telling each other our deepest secrets, information that we either hadn’t yet divulged to our partners or our best friends, or that we didn’t intend to. ‘I don’t know why I just told you that. I haven’t told any one else,’ was a common refrain. It was wonderful. We’d expected to be having an awful time, but here we were, looking forward to seeing each other and becoming completely absorbed in each other’s lives and stories. We heard tragic tales and triumphant ones, listened to each other, dispensed, took and ignored advice and guidance and frequently laughed until we couldn’t breathe. Several of us also found we had a weirdly visceral reaction to each other’s children. Part of the reason they’d been picked for the show was that they looked like each other, like part of the same family. They all looked like part of our families. And the sight of the whole chattering mass of them pouring out of rehearsals provoked an unexpectedly primordial kind of recognition: a gut-level impact based, it seemed, entirely on appearance.

As these new bonds deepened, my grip on everything else – i.e. real life – started to slip. I had stumbled into a whole new world, and whilst I was as disoriented as Alice in Wonderland, I was also as full of wonder. And at least as busy. The trouble with this whole performing child thing is that it eats your life. Aside from the essentials, everything else had to be put on hold. It was actually a positive thing that my friends had stopped answering my phone calls because they were tired of me wittering on about
The Sound of Music
, as there was no room left in my brain for anything except managing the complex logistics of getting Dora to where she was supposed to be with a (nutritious) packed lunch and no nits, and almost keeping on top of the work I was being paid to do. I’ve no idea how I would have managed if I’d also had to deal with the guilt and consequences of neglecting other children. Dirty washing hung out of the laundry basket, and no matter how hard I tried to shove it all in, there was no way I could get the lid on. The clean washing piled up, creased and
uncared-for,
on the chaise longue that I’d bought off eBay, planned to work on and never have, until it fell off, gathered dust on the floor and needed to be washed again before it could be worn. Meanwhile, the new life-forms growing on forgotten leftovers in my fridge had evolved so far that they’d held democratic elections and invented a cure for Ecover, as I discovered on the occasion when I tried, much against my better judgement, to find and deal with whatever it was that was making it smell like that. Neglect had prompted a fit of creativity and our house had transformed itself into a Tracy Emin art installation.