The Head of Drama Made Her Debut as the Dog

I read it with feeling, because since February I have been every part in our daughter’s Year 6 leavers’ show, a pirate musical, except hers. I have been the captain, the cabin boy, the parrot and, on Tuesdays, the sea.

Withington had it harder, because there were two Elles. Two Year 13 pupils shared the lead, and between them they describe a rehearsal schedule that would have broken me. The Head of Drama and the Director of Music, Mrs Sargent, played frat boys. In March one of the Elles spotted a head pop up from the middle of the empty Arts Centre seats and the pair laughed harder than either had ever laughed. Whose head, nobody says. I have read the interview three times looking for clues, which is not my business and is now my hobby.

Then there is the accent. Some of the court-scene lines, one Elle admits, are a challenge in an American accent. Our daughter’s pirate accent travels from Cornwall to Glasgow inside one sentence, and I am no longer allowed to comment, because the last time I said “arr” with real commitment she stopped rehearsal and asked me to bring it down a notch.

The Withington show ran four times: three evenings and a matinee for local primary schools. Afterwards the visiting children got to meet the cast and collect autographs. Somewhere in south Manchester there are nine-year-olds with Elle Woods’s signature in their reading folders. The only thing I ever brought home from a school play was nits.

Our show was last Thursday. I sat in the third row with the script on my knee, mouthing everybody’s lines, until my husband took it off me at the interval.

Then the Year 6 teacher came down the hall looking for a grown-up. The boy playing the ship’s dog had gone home with a temperature, the costume was a pair of ears on a hairband, and I was the only adult in the room who knew the blocking.

I made my debut, temporarily, in the second half. Our daughter could not look at me for the whole of the last song.