My young son has the makings of a marvellous actor…

In February last year, my son was the star of his school’s show. Well, I considered him the star, although I admit to a heavy bias in his favour. That production centred on Nian, the mythical lion whose banishment represents the transition from one year to the next in Chinese mythology. My son played the wise monk – and not the ‘wise monkey’ as his friend George had insisted beforehand – and took to the stage in flowing red robes.

He remembered all his lines, got a lot of laughs and I got all dewy eyed watching him smile with pride throughout his performance (those parts, at least, when we weren’t waving at each other). Afterwards, we beamed as we congratulated him on a job well done. At that point, it seemed like he was made for the stage.

I got all dewy eyed watching him smile with pride during his performance (at least when we weren’t waving at each other)

Just five months later, we sent him to a week-long drama workshop during the summer holidays. It should have been perfect. He and a mixed group of kids, including his best friend, Manu, all coming together to stretch their theatrical legs, culminating in a final show with a nice spread of parts for everyone. When that show arrived, however, we found him disconsolate. He’d spent the days before it constantly asking how far away it was. One morning, he begged me to let him skip it entirely, too innocent to think of faking an illness, but too self-aware to approach the spotlight with anything but terror.

At the performance itself, he simply refused to take to the stage. An entire church hall patiently waited for him to join his troupe, but he could not be moved. He spent the show on my lap, glowing with the ecstasy of the unseen and unjudged.

In his 1810 essay, On The Marionette Theatre , Heinrich von Kleist writes movingly of the natural grace one finds in the innocent mind and the tragedy of its departure once self-consciousness dawns. The examples given in the piece – a puppet more capable of beauty than a living dancer, a mindless bear who’s a match for any human fencer and a young man losing his charisma due to vanity – are odd ones, but they speak to an experience most parents will also recognise: those moments where you see your child lose that beautiful, oblivious spark of innocence, and fear they’re accruing those tiny aggregations of hesitance and doubt that have left you so much more constrained than them.

We enrolled him in after-school drama primarily to see if that spark could be reignited. When news of their final show came through via an email last week, we were delighted. Not just for the excellent entertainment it promised, but because he hadn’t been brigading us with questions about how far away it was, or whether he could skip it.

The morning of the show, we tell him we’re excited to see it and he smiles back at us. He doesn’t have a big part, or any part at all for that matter. He is just one of the chorus, due to recite a poem in his drama club’s exploration of Roald Dahl’s Matilda. We enter the school hall more nervous than he is. There is a hubbub of scraped chairs and a hush descends. My son takes to the stage, he waves, and he is beaming.

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