Nothing infantile about this delightfully weird family show
I’m standing outside the Imperial War Museum, watching 20 dancers in hazmat suits sing a ballad about poo, in an attempt to placate a crying baby the size of a double-decker bus. A few minutes later, I am asked to step aside to make way for a tank. An actual tank.
This is Zara, an ambitious, original and delightfully weird community theatre project, which arrived in London this weekend after a short run at Yorkshire’s Piece Hall last month.
This family show is a simple fable about an issue many people will never have considered: the stigma faced by parents with learning disabilities. It’s performed by an ensemble of more than 100, many of whom have disabilities themselves, including lead actress Joanne Haines.
Zara (Haines) is an expectant single mother, with a troubled past and a learning disability. Frustrated by bureaucrats and foiled by waiting lists, she has flunked her assessment and is now terrified her daughter will be taken away.
She doesn’t see why she should be subjected to so much more scrutiny than other parents. As she points out to her steely case worker, “They wouldn’t assess you if you were having a baby, would they?” Each part of their conflict is writ large: friends and family become a placard-wielding mob, social services become a Swat team and the enormous puppet baby looms over everything like a doe-eyed Godzilla.
Director Joyce Nga Yu Lee does not bring subtlety or complexity to the story, but isn’t trying to. Zara is an impassioned polemic that makes its case – that these kinds of families should be helped and supported, not separated – through gestures any four-year-old will understand. Zara and her caseworker face each other from the cockpits of duelling cherrypickers, which zoom up or down to reflect whoever is winning the argument. “Don’t take away my baby!” the mother wails, and our hearts ache.
It’s agitprop for tots – Brecht for babies, if you will – and why not? Like Brecht before her, Lee has struck lucky by finding an ingenious musical collaborator. Her Kurt Weill is Sarah Llwellyn, whose atmospheric score (and remarkably sophisticated song about poo – no, really) is the most impressive part of the show, and helps
to paper over a few pacing issues.
It’s a shame many of the target audience might miss it due to the 9pm start time. It seems foolish to present a children’s show post-watershed, but it might be a technical necessity: the expensive projections that make the museum’s outer walls warp and shimmer throughout the play would
Friends and family become a placard-wielding mob, social services become a Swat team
only be visible after sundown.
While Haines dangles from a rope, somersaulting in mid-air, videos of vox pops with real parents with learning disabilities appear in floating bubbles on the wall behind her, telling their own stories of love, frustration and prejudice, as they drift up and away on a multicoloured, psychedelic background. Imagine an LSD trip directed by Ken Loach and you’re halfway there.
It was the less polished sideshows that took place before the performance that won me over. Wander through the museum gardens, and you will see a pre-show interpretative dance – involving giant fabric vegetables, cradled like babies – from the disabled performers of east London’s Sardines Dance Collective.
One dancer speaks to a roving television reporter character about her childhood (“I ended up in 15 different foster homes”) for a mocked-up news bulletin that appears on a giant television screen at the opposite end of the park. It’s just one of several spoof television programmes, along with “Don’t Drop the Baby”, a demented game-show parody in which disabled contestants compete to keep their children. All this is just an amuse bouche for audience members who turn up early, a hint that this is a show with ideas to burn.