Do babies even like theatre?
The joys of live performances with very, very badly behaved audiences
by Alice Saville
"Wow, that baby's going to see a lot of theatre!" said various concerned onlookers as I squeezed myself (and a bump the size of a NASA alert-worthy asteroid) into various microscopic seats at press nights. "Oh, definitely," I said, cheerily, trying to ignore the fact that aforementioned baby was trying to kick a porthole out through my abdomen for a little unauthorised preview.
After all, I'd spent years charting babes-in-arms performances as they popped up across London's theatre landscape, wishing I had an excuse to go to the 2019 performance of Emilia attended by 200 strident proto-feminist babies, or the Little Angel's 2023 production of The Bed, where small ones snuggle up to a retelling of an apparently not-grim-at-all Sylvia Plath poem. If I wasn't going to take my baby to all this stuff, who was?
Still, the arrival of a beautiful little screaming red alien lifeform into my formerly peaceful home did arrest my plans, a little. As I soon realised, the windows in which you can take a baby to the theatre are briefer than a Caryl Churchill play. In the newborn days, although they do sleep a lot, there’s a constant, messy interplay of bodily fluids (milk in, yellow slime out) that feels easier at home. Then, they corral you into a brutal nap schedule that compartmentalises the day into two or three hour chunks of opportunity. Finally and most devastatingly of all, they learn to crawl and can only be in environments they’re allowed to gradually but thoroughly dismantle.
In short, babies are challenging theatre companions, even before you factor in enough burping, screaming, and random acts of violence to send the Theatre Etiquette crew fleeing to their nannies. Buying a theatre ticket thus involves making a wildly optimistic and expensive gamble that;
a) your baby will be awake, fed and broadly cheerful when you have to leave the house
b) your baby won't start screaming the second the performance starts
c) an explosive poo won't make its appearance en route, or mid show
d) you won't be so sleep-deprived and stressed that all joy is sapped from the experience
So inevitably, I had a lot of failed attempts. Theatre503 had a tempting babes-in-arms matinee but the only route from my corner of London involved three buses which – on the way home – would be packed with schoolkids. Several theatres had relaxed performances but I couldn't get a clear answer on whether that encompassed infants (there was a lot of "it's probably fine") so I skipped it – remembering comedian Fern Brady's furious Twitter rants when a surprise baby appeared at her show.
Instead, my first encounters with baby-friendly live performances were necessarily local. BYOB Comedy at Greenwich Picturehouse was a surreal hoot, its bleary-eyed comedians rousing their half-dead audience of sleep-deprived parents by cracking bracingly rude jokes designed for other crowds (while visibly reassessing both their career choices and their assumptions that parenthood lay in their future). And Baby Drag Bingo was a morning of joyful chaos where parents ambitiously juggled bingo cards, dabbers, booze, and costumed infants in the front room of a pub, the Prosecco-fuelled atmosphere of nihilism offering a deranged antidote to the usual tea-and-grumbling diet of parents' groups.
These expeditions involved a fair bit of planning – so I was somewhat trepidatious about heading to the other side of London for Polka Theatre's Soft or Spiky? for our first true theatre outing. Very few shows are explicitly aimed at babies, and we only made the six month minimum age cut off for this one by a few days. Inevitably, we arrived late, and I felt guilty wafting into this quiet space with a general aura of tumult. But it's an achievement on the part of director Daryl Beeton that stepping into the space is so instantly soothing. The lights are very dim, the floor is carpeted, and an array of coloured circles and triangles glow invitingly in the darkness.
This isn't worlds away from the baby sensory classes you'll find in so many village halls – but instead of being led by a faintly mardy franchise owner with a bunch of TEMU-ordered props and a perma-grudge against babies for messing with the running order, the experiments in texture here are led by a solo performer with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a toddler, exclaiming in wonder as she interacts with different shapes. A gently buzzing electronic soundtrack is soothing and stimulating at once, and the whole space feels transporting and strange.
I regressed a few decades exploring the Polka Theatre afterwards – so much child’s eye imagination has gone into creating this beautiful space, from the hamster wheel-style booths in the cafe to the tiny perspex windows in the walls that reveal little model mice in tiny scenes. But over a coffee, I did end up questioning whether the performance could have done more to acknowledge the adults in the audience – to give them a Pixar-style poignant wink or a hint of narrative to mull over in the dark.
There's definitely more to enthral both strands of the audience at the English National Opera's brief-but-lovely week of Opera For Babies – uniting two of society’s most vocally accomplished subsets for one glorious hour. Two female opera singers in canary yellow gowns swish into the ENO’s cafe, making little trills like rare birds. They're the creation of Norwegian director, costume designer and scenographer Christina Lindgren, who's deconstructed the elements of Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridice and assembled them in a form designed to delight the under fives.
The two performers sing individual syllables to each baby in turn, getting looks of wonder or confusion in return – then, they lead us all to a specially designed performance space that's like a nest of gorgeously handpainted scenery, its wooden flats decorated with pastoral scenes of trees and fields. The singers play a game of musical hide and seek, liquid waves of sound appearing from beyond the performance space (to protect little ears from the full deafening flood of a trained operatic soprano) and even listening to an aria on a crackling radio. Whimsical little plastic cows and faux foliage dangle from their baroque dresses, ready to delight their audience: one baby becomes fixated on patting the nearest performer's sturdy panniers, mesmerised by this unfamiliar padded version of childbearing hips.
This is very much an experience for well-behaved babies, with an expectation of quiet sitting. But if you manage to corral your child into position, the reward is a mesmerising meditation on language acquisition, with this deconstructed aria mimicking the way that babies learn to make first single sounds, then strings of babbling, then at last full, polished words and sentences.
Still, although my baby was in the fairly exceptional position of being able to go to two theatre shows precisely tailored to her demographic, the one that seemed to captivate her most of all wasn't aimed at her in the slightest. And perhaps that's unsurprising. After all, a baby turns almost everyone around them into a performer – shy, unlikely strangers pulling out virtuoso feats of facial acrobatics to earn a smile, and family members contorting themselves in exhausting performances are unlikely to provoke as much amusement as an unintended fart or burp. No carefully researched baby-targeted artifice can compare to the illicit sensory thrill of tearing an important document or plunging a little fist into a grown-up’s off-limits handcream.
The forbidden subject matter in question? The Glorious French Revolution (or: why it sometimes takes a guillotine to get anything done) - YESYESNONO's boisterous look at France's struggle to rid itself of its parasitic ruling classes, played out in a sports hall with a squeaking red plastic floor and balls to hurl at decadent poshos. It's at the New Diorama, a place that's full of good but very much child-free memories for me. Wheeling a pram over the threshold makes me feel strange – disjointed, two parts of me coming together and not fitting anymore, like a Tupperware that's been horribly misshapen by the dishwasher.
But the actual experience of watching the play is a delight, the company undaunted by performing to four adults and three babies on a drizzly weekday afternoon. Jessica Enemokwu instantly wins my baby over by looking her in the eyes and saying "yummy in my tummy" as she plays an aristocrat guzzling starving farmers' food – I worry that this performance will only encourage the innate despotic tendencies of its junior audience. The baby kicks her legs in excitement seeing riots and rebellions staged using bouncy castles and pommel horses, invigorated by all that naughtiness. Blissfully, we even manage a contact nap as Joe Boylan purrs a narration of bone-crushing brutality into the microphone: a bedtime story for future psychopaths.
Is all this bloodshed a bad influence? The logic of babes-in-arms performances is that babies don't understand what they're seeing before the age of one – the Royal Court even has a baby-friendly matinee of 4:48 Psychosis next June. I kind of agree, and kind of don't. I noticed my baby flinch at moments of violence, understanding the conflict, if not the words.
It's almost impossible to work out what babies take away from the theatre. The ability to understand narrative only develops between the age of one and three, but the ability to pretend develops earlier, as babies imitate what they see around them. Do they think performances are ‘pretend’, or real? It’s hard to tell, because the new setting often seems to result in a kind of a mute overwhelm, wide-eyed fascination at the sensory overload followed by deep sleep.
I think my baby did indeed like going to the theatre. Perhaps live performance isn’t as essential for infants in the way it is for slightly older kids, even if it still introduces them to new sensations, sounds, places, ways of being and interacting. But it felt essential for me. I think caregivers do need art, to give them thinking and breathing space, to give them escapism, and to help them make sense of lives which are simultaneously more narrowly restricted and more profoundly intense than ever before. And that art’s even more powerful if you’re experiencing it in parallel with the tiny being that turned your life upside down.
Late capitalism has piled endless pressures on new parents. Scientists and psychologists tell them that the foundations of their child's future health and happiness are laid in these first exhausting years, creating impossible-to-live-up-to standards around sleep, weaning and play. Marketers sell them endless products and activities (mostly dreamt up by other, older, burnt-out mothers, as a creative alternative to dragging themselves back to the office). Public spaces are too often inaccessible, or only grudgingly so. And economic pressures force them back to full-time work the moment the mat leave pay peters out.
Lucy Jones's book Matrescence is spoken about with passion and enthusiasm because it airs so many unspoken realities about the pressure-cooker experience of parenthood. The theme that feels most relevant here is the way it talks about the loss of ritual around new motherhood – the dearth of the moments of community coming together and support that used to mark big life transitions, smoothing the yawning chasm between before and after.
I'm not going to participate in some kind of New Age ritual of ‘becoming’, with smudged sage and flickering candles. But for me, taking baby to the theatre was a kind of ritual in itself. A way of joining the dots between my past and present, escaping boredom, and being invigorated by a new environment, fresh air and ideas running through my brain with the force of the Royal Court’s air conditioning. And for the baby? Wonder, delight, excitement, new upholstered surfaces to poo on – and the start of a habit that might last for years, long after this fleeting window of babyhood has closed.
Soft or Spiky? is at London’s Half Moon Theatre, 29 to 30 January. New Diorama Theatre has a babes-in-arms matinee of every production, as does Theatre503. Clip Theatre runs regular Baby Drag Bingo events in South East London, and BYOB Comedy runs a full programme of comedy sessions across the UK.