Cliche has it that matinee audiences are full of snoring older people. But it was infants who were snoozing – and gurgling, screaming and playing peekaboo – at the Vaudeville theatre in the Strand on Wednesday afternoon. They were assembled for what is thought to be a first for London’s West End: a baby-friendly performance.
Bottle warmers and rows of changing mats were installed in the bars as part of the pioneering initiative for the hit play Emilia. Parents and carers were invited to bring children under 12 months old and “let them roar” during Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s feminist drama about the supposed “dark lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Emilia Bassano.
The roars from the stalls occasionally drowned out the actors at the sold-out performance, which marked a triumph for accessibility. While babes in arms are permitted at family shows and “relaxed” performances at some theatres, West End playhouses have been resistant to follow the example of cinema’s now widespread parent and baby screenings.
It represented a logistical challenge for the Vaudeville, where storage space was found for more than 150 buggies (mostly hauled up five floors by volunteers). There was a celebratory, inclusive atmosphere, as babies chewed on each other’s toys and were bounced in the aisles while tired adults grabbed a bit of culture.
One of the mothers, Alice, who was there with three-month-old Gus, said she missed going to the theatre so this was an opportunity to “feel like myself”. Jenny, there with her daughter Isla, praised the show’s feminist message, saying “we’ve got to bring up some strong young women”. Another mother, Susannah, said this was her first visit to a West End theatre. It was also the first time she had travelled into central London with her four-month-old son, Aden.
The initiative came about after an actor, Gemma Goggin, had wanted to see Emilia and was trying to fit it in around breastfeeding her baby. “She tweeted to ask if we were planning any baby-friendly performances,” said Lloyd Malcolm. “I said no but if you want I can totally hang out with your baby while you’re seeing the show.” Goggin took her up on the offer but their tweets also “caught the eye of the producers who saw there was an appetite for a baby performance”. Goggin was at Wednesday’s matinee with her seven-month-old, Arno, who she takes to family theatre shows with Arno’s older sibling.
The singer Sophie Ellis-Bextor was in the audience with her fifth child, Mickey, who is three months old. “I’m a big fan of getting out and about,” she said, adding that she had taken Mickey to the cinema when he was a week old. Getting out to see friends and experience culture with your baby was “so good for your mental health”, she said.
Lloyd Malcolm has two children, aged four and seven, and she recalled the difficulty of arranging theatre trips when they were babies. “Unless you’re really good with a routine, which I never was, you don’t really know when your baby is going to be awake and hungry and needing you,” she said. “It took me quite a few months to work out the logistics and would include bringing my husband along to walk around with the baby in the pram outside so as soon as I came out at the interval I could breastfeed.”
Tickets for the one-off performance were priced between £25 and £35, and came with the adjacent seat included in the price. Usually the matinee seats go for £20 to £85. There was a majority of mums in the audience with a scattering of dads and grandparents. Andrew was there with his daughter Ophelia, who has already been to see an accessible performance at Shakespeare’s Globe (fittingly, the play was Hamlet).
Before the matinee of Emilia, its four female producers took to the stage to encourage the audience to come and go as they pleased. The play’s scenes of childbirth and death (about which theatregoers had received a trigger warning) gained an extra charge from the chorus of young voices among the audience. Some said the noise was louder than in parent-and-baby film screenings – perhaps due to West End theatre acoustics – but the responses seemed overwhelmingly positive. The theatre will be collecting feedback from the matinee. As yet there have been no announcements for similar West End performances.
“I hope today shows there’s an appetite for it,” said Lloyd Malcolm. With several mothers among the Emilia cast, she thought “most actors would be up for it … If we exclude any sector of society from seeing art I think that is a big problem. It’s our duty as theatre makers to make sure we change that system.”
The “let them roar” matinee befits a production that has empowerment at its centre. “The whole message of this play is about marginalised communities being heard,” said the playwright, who thinks parents and carers are “a community who often get forgotten about in terms of access”.
Emilia has an all-female cast who play men and women, thereby reversing the practice from Shakespeare’s day, and the role of Bassano is shared by three actresses. Like the musical Waitress, a little further up the Strand, Emilia has a female-led creative team. And like the West End hit Six, a musical concert about the wives of Henry VIII, it rediscovers underexplored female stories from history. Lloyd Malcolm shows Bassano was much more than a muse and presents her as poet, teacher, mother, partner and feminist.
Baby-friendly performances are part of a wider shift within an industry that is fast recognising that it must become more flexible for parents and carers who work in theatre, not just those who watch it. Last year, two dancers in the show 42nd Street embarked on what is thought to be the West End’s first job share when one of them returned to work after giving birth. Practical and financial assistance with childcare, rehearsal room creches and more flexible working patterns have all been suggested to benefit a workforce used to keeping antisocial hours.
At Shakespeare’s Globe, its artistic director, Michelle Terry, has promoted family-friendly rehearsal hours, working from 11am to 5pm. Emilia was commissioned by Terry for the Globe, where it was first staged before its West End transfer. The play runs until 15 June at the Vaudeville, where the grand circle bears the Latin adage Tempora mutantur in gold letters. Its translation? “Times are changed, we also are changed with them.”
