My son strides on to the stage dressed in red robes and stares impassively at the crowd. He’s playing a wise monk and not, as his friend George had told us for several weeks, a ‘wise monkey’. Luckily, we had not yet started on his costume by the time this was clarified.
School productions have come on a bit since my day. For one thing, I don’t remember us marking the Chinese new year. I certainly don’t remember staging as fine as the Chinese village we see before us: painted pagodas, ribboned flags and even a charming recreation of Nian, the mythical lion whose banishment represents the transition from one year to the next, operated by two enthusiastic children playing its front and back, respectively.
The result is a show that is roughly 7,000 times more culturally sensitive than we would have managed at my school. My two big starring roles at primary school are a case in point. I played Reuben, the inexplicably French brother in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, dressed as Eric Cantona, since this was 1996, and he was at that point the Frenchest man yet invented. The following year, I was Pablo the Mexican reindeer, whose very name should start ringing alarm bells. Both featured accent work that would likely land me in the Hague were I to recreate it today, and I’m lucky no footage from either performance survives.
Footage shall survive from today, though, as we all have our phones at the ready to capture our children’s star moments. The villagers debate whether to face down the beast that’s threatening them or to make a break for it. My son, the wise monk, must convince them to stand against Nian, which he feels is doable because he knows he fears the colour red, fire, noisy drums and fireworks. He strolls on stage to issue this information. ‘I am a wise monk from the temple,’ he says, a remarkably self-possessed statement, and the kind of uncannily realistic dialogue that really puts you right in the world of Zhou dynasty China. The villagers hear his words, but are unsure, many want to run away, others want further information. He shares his secrets and each is interpreted through mime. The colour red begets a dazzling aerobics display, the mention of noise leads to an adorable procession of drummers and firework dancers. For the concept of fire itself, they break the fourth wall slightly to offer an earnest demonstration on fire safety that is as engaging as it is informative. Finally, Nian is dispatched into the wilderness, symbolising the banishment of one year and the beginning of the next.
At the show’s end we rush to our wise little monk, who beams as if he’s astonished to see us. This would be easier to understand if we hadn’t spent much of the first half of the play waving at each other, but such is the transformative nature of theatre. ‘You were so good,’ we say, and he politely poses for a picture. I’m grinning like an idiot and my wife is crying. ‘I have to go,’ he says. We leave emotional and exhilarated, but mostly grateful that a superstar can spare some time for his adoring fans.
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
