Text 1: Eleven years old on the stage, by Toby Harrow

An original contemporary memoir extract.

When I was eleven, I spent nine months as one of the orphans in a big musical in London. There were three of us playing the same part, in rotation, so that no child performed more than the law allowed. I did three shows a week and spent the rest of the time pretending, at my ordinary school in Croydon, that I was an ordinary boy.

The rules surprised me. Every child needed a licence from the council. We had to be signed in and out at the stage door by our chaperone, Mrs Dunne, a retired dinner lady with a voice that could stop a coach party, who knew all our birthdays and confiscated all our sweets. On matinee days we were taught for three hours in a windowless room above the stage door, by a tutor who seemed to think that long division was the real show and the musical was a distraction.

And then there was the stage itself. Nobody warns you about the heat of the lights, or the sound a full theatre makes when it goes quiet just before you sing. On my first night I forgot a line, and a girl called Precious whispered it to me without moving her lips. I have never been so grateful to anyone.

I won’t pretend it was all glamour. I got home at half past eleven on show nights, slept in the car, and was useless at school the next morning. My friends stopped asking me to things because I always said no. My mum, who drove me there and back three times a week, aged about ten years.

But I learned things that no classroom could teach me: how to keep going when something goes wrong, how to be part of a team of forty people, how to stand in front of two thousand strangers and not be sick. When the run ended I cried for a week. Then I went back to being eleven, which was harder than I expected.

Text 2: The children of the pantomime, by A Special Correspondent

An original newspaper feature written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

This newspaper feature was written in 1879, during the rehearsals for a Christmas pantomime at a large theatre.

Those who laugh at the fairies and imps of the Christmas pantomime seldom pause to ask where they come from. I have lately spent an evening behind the scenes at a great theatre in the Strand, and I can now tell them.

There are in this year’s piece no fewer than sixty children, the youngest scarcely six years old, the eldest perhaps twelve. They are drawn almost entirely from the poorer streets about the theatre, and for many of them the few shillings a week which they earn are the difference, in their homes, between a fire and none. One little girl, who was to be a snowflake, told me with great seriousness that her money paid the rent.

Rehearsals began at seven and were not concluded until near midnight. For the greater part of that time the children waited in a cold stone passage, sitting upon the floor in rows, many of them asleep against one another like puppies in a basket. When they were wanted, a man with a bell and a loud voice drove them up the stairs, and in a moment they were transformed. I confess that I have seldom seen anything prettier than those sixty small figures moving in their lines across the stage, every face alight, every step in its place.

Yet I could not forget the passage. At midnight I followed them out into the street, where a crowd of mothers waited with shawls in the sleet, and watched them carried home, half asleep, through the black and dripping lanes.

I do not say that the theatre is cruel to them. The manager is kind, the children are proud of their work, and the wages are honestly paid. But I would ask the gentlemen who applaud so loudly in January to remember that the fairy queen they admire went to bed at one in the morning, and will be in the schoolroom, if she is in it at all, at nine.

Both of these texts are about children who perform on the stage.

Compare:

• what the writers say about the lives of child performers
• how the writers present these lives

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