The Borrowers

I’d never been to the Watermill before. I didn’t really know that much about it and the idea of going to a show for kids in the middle of nowhere seemed like the sort of thing someone much more professionalised than me should be doing. But I did go. To see The Borrowers. And, yeah, it was alright.

First, the show: was… fine. I was really looking forward to seeing how they did tiny borrower people onstage and that was pretty exciting: they have this trick where they dangle a tiny person on a tiny string while at the same time a real-life actor hangs from a rope from the ceiling, and where they show you a tiny object that they then put through the floor and it appears onstage as a full-sized object and these bits tickled every bit of me, but they only did them sparingly, so I felt a little shortchanged, like watching a magician who had one really good trick with an elephant but decided instead to do a whole lot of quite mediocre standup about his mother-in-law.

The actors were really excitable in the way that children like, though sometimes I wondered that they weren’t talking more to the audience: the spareness of the fourth-wall breaking narration seemed unhelpful, particularly when it popped up at the moments that probably least required it. I don’t really know why they didn’t just give into baser instincts and go full panto.

I also wondered, while on the subject, whether considerations of class and gender politics *I know – just a kids show* shouldn’t be really front and centre when making theatre for properly impressionable people: the tiny female characters pretty much all at a loss as to how to walk properly until a bloke (admittedly also tiny) came along and explained it to them [this genuinely happened about three quarters of a way through]. And the boy dressed as Lord Fauntleroy who saves them is lovely but his maid and the sort of butler bloke are horrible and evil, which was weird.

But basically it was good and the actor-musicianship (something I later found out was the Watermill’s whole, lovely bag) was properly great and impressive and made everything smooth and lively in a good way.

And watching plays with children, without having children (which I don’t), is a really miraculous experience – they liked anything big and overt, all the set-pieces really worked with them and all the chatting made them snore (and fart – a lot – I was sat right at the top of the theatre and at the end I thought I might pass out). They talked and were occasionaly shh’d by their teachers but it was all in the spirit of the thing and none of them were rude and they all just accepted, without any sense of being told how the thing worked, that these were tiny people in a really big world, despite the imaginative leap that required me and my stupid grown-up head.

______

P.S. That theatre is honestly magic: if you haven’t been you should. It’s a converted watermill and still looks like one and the river goes under the theatre and the ushers offered me cake when I walked in because they had loads left over from someone’s birthday – and he did it like it was no big deal, like everyone gets offered cake at the theatre, which maybe they should I suppose.

–

A year after starting the blog here, I realised that Blogger is quite an unaccountably shit site and I wanted a prettier one, so I've moving to a Wordpress over here. Please do follow me there.