Parents' blog
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All the world’s a stage
Posted Tuesday November 24th 2009
by Sarah Bourn
Rather than spending years of hard graft and huge sums of money going to stage school, aspiring actors could get the same result by reading stories to children for a few months. The sheer range of silly voices, funny accents, comedy character role-playing and physical theatre required to keep a little one entertained is immense. And it means that by the time your child goes to school, you could probably single-handedly put on a West End adaptation of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and get five-star reviews all round.
My own demanding critic, ten-month-old Angus, insists on an extremely high level of dedication to each book-reading performance. If he doesn’t feel I’m giving it my best effort, he voices his displeasure by shrieking loudly, crawling off or sometimes just blowing raspberries – I bet Sir Ian McKellen never has to put up with that sort of audience.
On the plus side, this has definitely developed my repertoire of convincing animal noises. Our latest favourite is Hairy Maclary’s Caterwaul Caper by Lynley Dodd, which requires imitation of no less than six different types of bark – Hercules Morse (‘WOOF’), Bottomley Potts (RO-RO-RO-RO-RO), Muffin McLay (‘RUFF-RUFF’), Bitzer Maloney (‘BOW-WOW-WOW-WOW’), Schnitzel von Krumm (YIP-YIP’)…
