Stage Mum (8 page)

The confirmation letter from Jo Hawes arrived on the last day of term, welcoming us to
The Sound of Music
and enclosing the licence forms I needed to complete so that Dora could legally work on the show – all children working in the entertainment industry must be
licensed
by their local authority: there are strict legal controls on the amount of time they can spend on stage or set

The first UK regulations limiting the employment of performing children were introduced in the Prevention of Cruelty to, and Protection of, Children Act 1889. Chapter 44 – which, incidentally, defined a child as a boy under fourteen and a girl under sixteen – prohibited adults getting children to perform on the streets for money (this counted as begging), performing anywhere not licensed for public entertainments between10 p.m. and 5 a.m. and prohibited all children under ten ‘singing, playing, or performing for profit’ anywhere. Contravention could be punished by ‘a fine not exceeding twenty-five pounds, or alternatively, or in default of payment of the said fine, or in addition thereto, to imprisonment, with or without hard labour, for any term not exceeding three months’.

If, however, it was ‘shown to the satisfaction of a petty sessional court, or in Scotland the school board, that proper provision has been made to secure the health and kind treatment of any children proposed to be employed thereat’, local authorities could license any fit child over seven to perform professionally. These regulations were refined in the Children & Young Persons Act 1933 and then again in Children (Performance) Regulations 1968.

Also in the letter was a list of documents and details that we were required to provide, and five pages of information ‘regarding your child’s appearance in THE SOUND OF MUSIC’. Because Dora’s name had been changed, as well as her birth certificate I’d need to provide a photocopy of her passport. While I was working out what was required, it occurred to me that this would be a bad time to change our last names again. Not only would there be all the faff with the documentation, but Laurie’s surname is Temple. You can’t change a little girl’s surname to Temple when she’s just about to go on the stage. That looks like hubris. Anyway, I like ‘Gee’. It was my grandfather’s stage name: he changed the family’s (from Goldstein) to match it after another violinist also named Harold Gee got in
contact
from Yorkshire and complained that Grandpa had stolen his name.

‘You might,’ Jo wrote, ‘need to sit down with a drink or a cup of tea’ to wade through the information.’ I settled for a glass of orange juice, worrying about how I was going to write a ‘short biography’ for a child too young to have one, where I’d stashed her birth certificate and whether our doctor would still write a letter saying Dora was fit to perform even though she had an enormous verruca on her left foot.

The five-page information pack included details of which teams the children would be in – with a couple of gaps as they were still one Louisa and one Brigitta short – with the caveat that this was likely to change. It confirmed that rehearsals were due to start on 25 September, and stressed very strongly that ‘Children will be expected to attend school whenever they are not in rehearsal and it is vital that they do because failure to do so could result in the licence being revoked … If they are not well enough to attend school they are not well enough to do the show!’ There would be no time off for any reason except illness, and if our child was ill, we had to let Jo know as early as possible in the day, so she could get someone else’s to cover. If you were the someone else whose child she was asking to cover, you would be expected to jump to it: ‘I appreciate that it may be inconvenient but it is part of the job.’ As she didn’t have an agent, Dora’s ‘salary’ would be paid straight to her – time to open her first bank account – but travel expenses would come to me. I wondered idly if they’d cover the costs of a taxi home from the theatre, as the prospect of getting Dora home by tube at 11 p.m. at night was not one I wanted to entertain, any more than I wanted to pay congestion and parking charges to drive her in.

I read on. Parents, I discovered, were required to provide a packed lunch or tea for rehearsals that we would not be permitted to watch. We also had to check regularly for head lice – a problem that Dora had, hitherto, happily been free from, and phone Jo the moment a nit reared its ugly egg. We would also be barred from backstage (no need
to
take up knitting): the children would be chaperoned by ‘professional, licensed chaperones’. We were also sternly warned against discussing our child’s performance with them. ‘Occasionally,’ Jo explained, ‘a child will deliver a completely different performance once their mother has watched – believe me, it happens!’

A few days later I heard – from another source – a story about a little girl who’d been in
Annie
. She played her part brilliantly throughout the rehearsal and preview periods. Then, on opening night, the poor little orphan arrived at the stage door dolled up like a pop star, and once the curtain was raised proceeded to do her best to upstage the rest of the cast. When asked why she’d deviated from the director’s instructions, she said, ‘My mummy told me to do it like that.’ Apparently, it didn’t do her ‘career’ any good.

Aside from all that, it was made very clear that the children had to behave themselves in a disciplined and grown-up way, keeping unnaturally – but necessarily – quiet while waiting to go on stage, and being extremely sensible at other times.

I wasn’t too worried about sensibleness as far as Dora was concerned. Remarkably, given both genes and environment, she has always been pretty sensible. I’ve never, for instance, had to extract a Hama bead from her left nostril, a pencil from her ear or any of her fingers from an electric socket. Nor have I regularly needed to shout at her to
STOP
at the kerb, look, listen, think and
WAIT FOR ME!

I was most worried about controlling my own curiosity. How would I cope with being excluded from rehearsals, barred from backstage? I need to know what’s going on, who said what to whom, why and when they said it. And my experiences of trying to get Dora to tell me what had happened during the auditions had proved to me that no matter how much chocolate ice cream you wave under its nose, you can’t bribe that kind of information out of a six-year-old. Not only was the information she provided in most cases as sparse as the hair on her grandfather’s head, it was also, I found out later, inaccurate.

At the back of the pack – after
The Sound of Music
Anti-Bullying Policy, four to-the-point bullet points detailing how any unkindnesses would be dealt with swiftly – a team list was attached. There were three teams – red, blue and green. Dora’s name was in the red team. The green team had two gaps, still needing a Louisa and a Brigitta.

I rang Jo Hawes that evening to ask a couple of questions about the licence forms and ended up having a long conversation about what to expect now my child would be working in the West End. During this conversation I discovered that one of the grown-ups called Jo involved in the auditions – the one with long curly hair – was, in fact, Ros Jones, the children’s musical director, and that Andrew Lloyd Webber had never been there.

Jo also told me that children in musicals have a fantastic time, but the parents don’t. We would have to drop our children off in good performing order and pick them up at unsocial times. There would be nowhere comfortable for us to wait – ‘I’ve had breast-feeding mums who’ve had to spend all evening sitting in the car with their babies, because there’s nowhere for them to go.’ Our kids would get tired and fractious and, because they had to be on their best behaviour around the theatre, would save all their tantrums for us. There was, in short, nothing in it for us. It would, Jo said cheerfully, be ‘hell’ for the parents. That was encouraging. As was the way she laughed at me like I’d said something hilarious when I suggested that being in
The Sound of Music
might be a one-off experience for Dora. Apparently, once they’ve done one show, children never want to stop. ‘Most of them end up at Sylvia Young’s,’ she explained briskly, as if it was an obvious case of predestination. ‘If not at the school itself, then at least with the agency.’ I thought back to the party of smiley uniformed children who’d arrived en masse at the final audition, chattering amongst themselves and looking, in my opinion, unnaturally keen and clean. In my head, I briefly superimposed Dora’s face on top of one of their bodies. It fitted, but my stomach
rebelled.
I had a visceral aversion to the idea of any stage school: the appalling children I was convinced would fetch up there, not to mention the uneven education I was sure they’d receive, one which, focusing on performance skills – singing, dancing and acting – at the expense of the academic subjects they’d need for real, adult life, would deprive them of a productive Plan B should – as was likely – their ambitions for a career in showbiz come to nowt.

Then it was the summer holidays. Towards the end of July, the three of us spent a few days down in Bournemouth with Laurie’s mum, Lilli, admiring the beautiful job she’d done of displaying our wedding photos and watching the first
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?
– the BBC reality TV show through which Maria von Trapp was to be cast. This was, as far as we were concerned,
serious
reality TV. The outcome of the vote would affect our lives – well, Dora’s life, anyway. What if the public chose a Maria who loathed children? Someone who could act well enough to come across all maternal on the telly and onstage, but morphed into the Wicked Witch of the West the moment the lights went down? Or who was just grandly self-obsessed, humourless and slightly scary? Or who was so keen to demonstrate how much she
adored
children that she was loveyishly all over them in a yucky cheeks-covered-in-lipstick-kisses kind of way?

We fell for Connie Fisher’s vivacity, determination and perfect-for-the-part voice from the first time we saw her twirling, eyebrows raised, in her tacky orange pseudo-dirndl (which was in programme four – we missed two and three). But we were also, Laurie in particular, quite taken with Siobhan, the tall and stunningly beautiful Maria with the heart-stopping voice who eventually came third. There were also a lot of wider-family debates about the merits of Abi – known as Tomboy Maria. Should we support our own and vote for her because she was also Jewish? Personally, I was against voting along sectarian lines.

Dora loved watching. ‘I want to vote for
her
,’ she shrieked, every time any one of the girls sang a song, irrespective of whether they were even in tune. And I let her – at least once. That way, whoever ended up getting the gig, Dora could sidle up to her shyly at rehearsal and whisper innocently and truthfully, ‘I voted for you,’ which could only be a good thing.

On our return to London, after a long chat with a very helpful woman at the World of Camping, we bought an enormous two-bedroom tent – and by enormous, I mean the mansion of all tents, the sort of thing designed for an entire troop of Girl Guides to earn their camping, firelighting and first aid badges in – and sundry other bits of equipment. With some trepidation, we headed off towards Totnes for a ten-day alternative camping experience at the Sharpham Barton Family Camp.

On 9 August an email arrived from Jo Hawes asking a couple of the kids – Michael (Kurt) and Yasmin (Marta) – if they could pop in to the Really Useful offices on the following Monday as they were auditioning for the last Louisa and Brigitta and wanted to make sure that they got ones that were the right height. The email also contained some information about rehearsals. They would be happening at the Jerwood Space starting, as expected, on 25 September. ‘All children will be called all day that day 10–6. After that the plan is that the children will be called in the afternoons and all day Saturday. Every child will have a complete day off every week apart from Sunday which will be a day off for everybody. Every child will be called every Saturday.’ Jo promised ‘more precise details soon’, and also asked us all for our holiday dates, so they could work out if a couple of ‘music calls’ could be fitted in before rehearsals started.

I Googled the Jerwood Space. It looked very posh: all artworks, stripped wood and sparkling glass. Luckily for us, it was close to Southwark station, on the Jubilee line, which meant we could park near Dora’s school, walk from there to Neasden station and get a
direct
train. It also, I noticed on the ‘About Us’ section of its website, had a café. Great. I could sit there with my computer and get on with my work.

On the 14th, another email from Jo. This one informed us that they were now fully cast. An updated team list was attached, with two new names: Georgia Russell (Louisa) and Grace Vance (Brigitta) added to the green team.

Meanwhile, in the two-month hiatus between the casting of the von Trapp children and the start of rehearsals, my curiosity about
The Sound of Music
morphed into a full-scale research project. I surfed the web for any information I could find about the film, the stage show and the original true story of the von Trapps. I ordered
The Trapp Family Singers
– Maria von Trapp’s autobiography – from www.abebooks.co.uk. A very cheap and musty thirty-eight-year-old Fontana paperback arrived a few days later. It said ‘The Sound of Music’ in big pink, lime green, turquoise and orange gothic lettering above the author’s name, which was much smaller and in a very plain black upper case type. Then – much larger – ‘Julie Andrews’, followed, in fluffy pink italics, by ‘stars in the 20th Century Fox Film based on the touching romantic story of THE TRAPP FAMILY SINGERS’. The confection was completed by an extravagantly lime-green-bordered circular still from the film showing Julie as Maria, standing in front of a lake looking winsomely lovely and appropriately chaste in pale aqua chiffon and a straw hat.

I opened the book and browsed the foreword. Maria writes that her book is ‘introduced as a canticle of love and gratitude to the Heavenly Father in His Divine Providence’. Blimey, I thought. This all sounds a bit pious. Then I engaged my brain. The real-life Maria was training to be a nun. Of course she’d be pious. What did I expect?