Cautionary Tales for Children

Cautionary Tales for Children runs at Merrigong from April 23-4. Based on the poems by Hilaire Belloc, written by Claudia O'Doherty, directed by Naomi Edwards.

 

There is a lot of potential for fun in Cautionary Tales for Children. Sadly, the show does not live up to it. The performers try their hardest to engage their audience, but ultimately fall short. This show isn't bad, per se - it has some good elements - but overall, it's pretty mediocre.

Cautionary Tales for Children is based on the poems of Hilaire Belloc. Belloc wrote the poems in the early twentieth century and they were intended to be a parody of the cautionary moral tales prescribed to children in the Victorian period. As such, the consequences for misbehaviour were very exaggerated - for example, in one tale a boy wanders away from his nurse and as a direct consequence, is eaten by a lion. In this production, the tales are related through song to the audience by a troupe of time-travelling children (Jolyon James, Sarah Ward, Natalie O’Donnell, and Mark Jones) who preach good behaviour wherever they go. Their time machine is powered by good behaviour, and so the show is based on the premise that they must scare the children into being good via Belloc’s tales.

Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the cast, the show fails to engage the audience. It’s aimed at kids aged 8-12, but I’m pretty sure that if you took a 12 year old along to this, they wouldn’t be very impressed. In terms of tone, it seemed to be aimed at a much younger audience. Considering that the poems were originally written for adults, this isn’t a particularly good decision. The show gets caught somewhere in the middle. It’s hard to judge how effective kids’ theatre is when you’re an adult, but the kids in the audience really didn’t seem to be responding to the show. They responded when they were asked to – screamed when they were asked to scream, for example – but otherwise, they were almost silent throughout, which seemed to me that either a) they weren’t that engaged, or b) they were really, really well-behaved. And if it’s the latter, well... that kind of defeats the point of the show.

I also think the show had structural problems which made it hard for the audience of kids to relate to it. The main characters are neither co-conspirators with the audience nor antagonists – they exist somewhere in between. Perhaps a commitment either way here would have made the show stronger. As it was, the characterisation felt a little muddled and confused. I felt at the beginning that the interludes between the poems might be the most compelling part of the show, but it quickly became a little self-indulgent and waffle-y. And maybe it’s just me, but they all had a kind of creepy, Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang-esque vibe about them which I don’t think was intended.

The poems themselves are a little dated, but I think they could have been made relevant to and fun for a kids’ audience. This show, sadly, does not do it. (I’m also sad that they didn’t include the Belloc poem about the boy who cried so much it ruined his political career, but I get why they didn’t.) They get lost in the song: sometimes the music is so complex it’s hard to actually make out the words and thus follow the cautionary tale.

I want to end this review on a positive note. The set for this show (designed by Jonathon Oxlade, last seen on Wollongong stages in School Dance) is absolutely awesome. It’s practical, functional, and has a really appealing aesthetic. Five stars for the set. The rest of the show...? Not so much.

 

School Dance

School Dance ran at the Sydney Theatre Company from January 11-February 3, and at Merrigong from February 7-February 9. By Matthew Whittet, directed by Rosemary Myers.

The 1980s are a special decade for me. Not just because I was born then (I was) but because of the memories I have. A lot of people can’t remember their early childhood, but there’s one thing I remember really clearly from mine. The music. My mother was an aerobics teacher, and she used to take me along to her classes when she couldn’t find anyone to watch me. I have a stupid amount of 1980s dance music uploaded in my brain. I don’t think about it a lot, but when I do, it always makes me smile. This is the place that School Dance took me to.

Baudrillard has this idea that things that make us nostalgic allow us to effectively become tourists in our own lives. Like any tourist, we go and see the cool things – in the case of the 1980s, it’s the music and the clothes and the whole retro enterprise – but we gloss over other stuff. It’s really interesting thinking about this alongside School Dance. Sure, on the surface it seems like fun and games and glitter, but there is darkness beneath, very real fears that drive the three boys at its heart – a drunk father, a terrifying bully, and the fear of literally fading into the background forever. It might be a tourist trip, but it’s also a quest. School Dance is at once a relatively realistic take on teenage angst, a surreal piece of art, and a John Hughes movie. It has just the right mix of nostalgia and drama, humour and heartfeltedness, irony and sincerity. It’s at once hilarious and humorous, a tribute and a message.

School Dance is the story of Matt (Matthew Whittet) and his friends Luke (Luke Smiles) and Jonathon (Jonathon Oxlade). They are all losers (of different breeds, as the hilariously meta voiceover reminds us). Matt is so desperate to ask popular girl Hannah Ellis (Amber McMahon, who plays several different female roles in the show) to dance and so equally convinced that she will say no that he begins to become invisible. He, his friends, and an unlikely invisible ally (also Amber McMahon) must overcome dangers untold and hardships unnumbered to get back to the school dance, where Matt must finally step up, be brave, and pursue his desires. Also, there is a unicorn (Amber McMahon again).

The teen genre is often written off for being simplistic, but School Dance clearly exposes that this is not the case. It is a deceptively complicated piece of theatre – beneath all the music and the laughs, there are emotional layers waiting to be peeled back. The invisibility and centrality of Matt highlights the fact that the loser is often the hero in the typical 1980s piece, and his journey shows that just because he is beaten down he is not automatically heroic – Matt must earn his payoff. He must go through a transformative journey to realise what he really wants at that school dance, against a backdrop of glitter curtains, mogwai, and truly radical dancing.

I loved School Dance. I have a lot of nostalgia for the 1980s in me, and I can’t see how anyone who didn’t have a soft spot for the decade of shoulder pads and Martha and the Muffins wouldn’t really enjoy this show. In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym talks about nostalgia as “a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values” (8). She also writes that “irony is not opposed to nostalgia” (354). School Dance strikes the perfect balance between the two. It creates the 1980s as an enchanted world, one in which our heroes must go on a quest, and it laughs at itself at the same time. It is at once a fairytale, a Dali painting, a period drama, and a Spandau Ballet concert. Most of all, it is enormous fun, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who even vaguely remembers the 80s. And anyone who went to high school, really – that kind of thing transcends decades and becomes universal.

(Sidebar: Gold by Spandau Ballet is one of the songs I use when I’m in a tough place with my thesis and need to get motivated. I blast it loud and pretend I’m in an inspirational montage from an 80s movie. School Dance made that fantasy that much more potent. Thanks, Windmill Theatre!)