Shiver me timbers, what a show!
A Pirate’s Life for Me V&A Museum of Childhood
Ahoy there, me hearties! It’s half term, the kids have got a week off school and what are you going to do with them? Well, if you live in or near London, can I recommend A Pirate’s Life for Me, the new exhibition at the V&A Museum of Childhood? Several years in the making, it’s a jaunt through fictional pirates of popular culture, from Captain Hook and Long John Silver to Pugwash and Peppa Pig, playfully presented, with heavy collaboration from actual children.
The result is an engaging exhibition that does a good job of appealing to its target audience of two- to eight-yearolds. It starts in a dark seaside tavern, complete with wooden table and enamel crockery for role-play purposes, and ends up in a tropical paradise island centred around an almost-full-sized pirate ship – cue much ringing of the ship’s bell, and peering through a telescope.
For such a contained exhibition, it packs a lot in. At the beginning we’re introduced to the golden age of the pirate, lasting from about 1650 to 1725 and it’s explained that pirates in stories were based on real-life people.
The aforementioned seaside tavern, which also features a couple of short animations, leads into a funky, Uv-lit corridor (top tip: wear something white to visit), which in turn opens out into a dressing-up room that then leads on to the ship.
There’s plenty to see and do for the whole range of ages: my two-year-old loved putting on a pirate patch, clambering over the pirate ship, sitting on a felt pebble to look at pirate story books and identifying various woolly sea creatures; older children can take a treasure hunt, listen to a series of “story boxes” with recordings about pirate life made by local children, and watch an animation of an unpublished play, Barnacle Bill, written by the BBC broadcaster David Munrow when he was eight.
The exhibition also features a number of toy pirate ships, including a Playmobil one – a source of particular delight to a friend’s children, who were overjoyed to discover that one of their own much-loved toys had made it into a museum.
The immersive nature of the exhibition is a sign of things to come: the Museum of Childhood is about to undergo a redevelopment, which will see more shows of this type, with similar levels of collaboration with children from the local community. Pirates is, says a spokesman, “encouraging families to learn together”, and as such represents a move away from the rest of the
It starts in a dark seaside tavern, complete with wooden table and enamel crockery for role-play
museum, where toys are mostly encased in glass.
So does it work? Broadly, yes. I have three boys, aged two to eight, and can imagine them all having a lot of fun here, as well as learning something new along the way.
There are some minor quibbles: as an inveterate label-reader myself, I would have liked more of an explanation at the beginning about the real pirates of history to set the scene, before delving into the fictional side of things, which might help to anchor (pun intended) and contextualise the whole thing.
I’m not convinced the story boxes work – children love to put headphones on and listen, but when what they’re listening to is, as in some cases here, halting or unclear, they move on quickly. Interspersing the contributions of kids with some more confident adult voices might have worked better.
And one little six-year-old girl complained there weren’t enough female pirates featured – she knew they existed, because she’d read about them in Goodnight Stories for Rebel
Girls, and was quite miffed.
That said, this is an exhibition you could happily bring boys, girls and their parents to and know that everyone would have fun. My one piece of advice is to get there early – it’s going to get full enough to want to push several pirates off the plank.
Until April 22. Details: vam.ac.uk