‘A panto?’ I said, grimacing as if my wife had just announced our Sunday would be spent tasting new strains of Ebola. ‘Yes,’ she insisted. ‘And I agreed to this?’ I continued, in roughly the 7,000th iteration of that game where I insist that a long-standing appointment is complete news to me. ‘YES!’ she repeated, but with more patience than my crumpled, brow-beaten gaze deserved.
If I have a failing as a husband – and I must have at least one, surely – it might be my habit of forgetting things the second I’ve been told about them; things I don’t want to do most especially. Were I to have another, it might be laziness when it comes to doing things I don’t want to, like leaving the house on weekends.
My dislike of pantos is not from unfamiliarity. They are wildly popular in Ireland, one of those British imports, like Carling lager or internment, that have done so much damage to our culture we were forced to retaliate with Mrs Brown’s Boys. My wife loves them, but nothing about loud, boorish farces that feature soap stars singing pop songs and telling willy jokes appealed to me, even as a child. For my wife, on the other hand, that’s pretty much a description of her perfect evening.
There’s also the fact that our son is barely capable of sustaining interest during his own bowel movements, let alone the duration of a dazzling stage performance in the presence of hundreds of other screaming children. After eyeing up the stairs and wondering how easy it would be to break my ankles, we dressed my son and padded out the door.
I shouldn’t have worried. The ‘panto’ was nothing of the sort, but a sensory experience called Scrunch in the Unicorn Theatre in London. It turned out we had misinterpreted John and Julia, who’d kindly bought us tickets and who’d never said it was a panto at all. Scrunch is, instead, a gently riveting sensory performance aimed at hitting a baby’s auditory and visual sweet spots. This was a target it hit dead-on in my son’s case, his delighted laughter only drowned out by his friend Huw, who quickly esteemed himself as audience MVP by guffawing infectiously throughout.
It’s hard to categorise Scrunch, which involves a performer miming a soothingly repetitive sequence of actions and manipulating different materials and objects – paper bags, crunchy crepe paper, jangly foil blankets – in a manner that is perfectly pleasing to adults, but holds his infant spectators in thrall. It was astounding to sit there and see a room full of babies completely enrapt by his simple actions – and to see my 18-month-old son so engaged with a piece of theatre. Moreover, it was a lesson for me to embrace novel experiences. Like a jaded, C-list celeb recreating an unlicensed Disney villain for the stage, perhaps my days of avoiding new things are now behind me.
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
