Dot, Squiggle and Rest

‘I don’t like the man,’ announced my two-year-old daughter, as bearded cellist Sergio Serra loomed out of the darkness in his movable chair, like some musical Davros, to play his scratches and squeaks. He was soon joined by Sarah Dacey singing a series of complimentary pitches, further contributing to this exercise in extended technique. Meanwhile, dancer Jasmilina Sipilä limbered around the tiny stage, doing tentative cartwheels and holding 3D cardboard shapes.

Don’t get me wrong: director Joy Haynes’s piece is 40 minutes of competently played abstract music theatre that wouldn’t be out of place in an adult contemporary opera series like Tête à Tête – but this is supposedly aimed at children under five. In fact, it’s a co-production between the Polka Theatre and the Royal Opera House designed ‘to draw young audiences into a musical world of movement, dance and play’. However, with no introduction, no interaction, no discernible narrative, it seems a very po-faced approach to presenting dramatic art to such tender souls, plunging them into darkness, forcing them to sit in silence behind a line, and not inviting them to join in.

The show, like the music by Elspeth Brooke, is quite inconsequential; it is billed as a journey through a fantastical garden – really? Anyway, let’s allow the children to be the judges. Both my two- and four-year-old left after ten minutes, the former because she was frightened, the latter because he was bored. ‘It wasn’t very funny,’ he later explained. When it was over, it was announced that the remaining children could stay behind and examine the musical cardboard shapes. Only a handful did – it was too little, too late.