‘Playing Tiny Tim has given my girl a new lease of life’
Reading Braille and using a cane haven’t stopped Eleanor Stollery, eight, becoming a stage star, writes Rosa Silverman
Should you find yourself in the audience of The Old Vic’s production of A
Christmas Carol this year, you might assume the cute eight-year-old girl playing Tiny Tim is another of those talented child stars, plucked from some elite stage school. In the case of Eleanor Stollery, talented, yes undoubtedly; but she is no drama school pupil. She attends a mainstream school in a suburb of south-west London. That is, when she’s not undergoing treatment for a brain tumour that has left her severely visually impaired.
One of four children with disabilities playing Bob Cratchit’s sick son in rotation in this acclaimed adaptation of Charles Dickens’s much-loved novella, Eleanor has rather a lot to juggle. Diagnosed with the tumour at four, she’s been in and out of treatment ever since, and is currently undergoing weekly chemotherapy, along with regular MRI scans, hearing tests and blood tests. Not that you’d know it if you saw her on the stage.
“It’s quite surreal,” agrees her father, Tim, a self-employed computer consultant. “We have to pinch ourselves because it’s like a dream. It’s also keeping her going. It gives her something to focus on.”
For the first three-and-a-half years of her life, Eleanor was a perfectly healthy little girl. But about five years ago, her parents Tim and Kelly noticed a marked decline in her visual abilities. She started to draw things in closer to her face, lost interest in the television and meal times became difficult. At first they attributed the changes to her age, and suspected she would just need glasses. But her eyesight soon deteriorated so drastically she could hardly see an object at her feet.
After several specialists had checked Eleanor’s eyes, she was sent for an urgent MRI scan, which she had in 2015 at St George’s Hospital in south London. There, her parents were told a large tumour – or low-grade glioma – had been found in the hypothalamus region of her brain, over her optic nerves. Chemotherapy began eight days later and continued for the next 18 months. Eleanor is now on her third round of chemotherapy.
“[We were] heartbroken,” says Tim, 48. “Our lives were literally changed in a moment.” Eleanor, fortunately, has no memory of the bombshell diagnosis. “I don’t really remember it because I was so young,” she says when I meet her and her father for lunch near their home in Hampton.
Eleanor is bright, chatty, articulate and irrepressible; in some ways a typical eight-year-old, but in other respects she’s had to grow up fast. Today, she’s tucking into pizza and bubbling with excitement about her newfound success on the stage. In a few hours’ time, she’ll be up there beneath the bright lights, living a fantasy come true. It’s hard to imagine that the following day, this energetic child will be horribly sick and exhausted after another gruelling session of chemotherapy at The Royal Marsden Hospital in Sutton.
“She’ll be a different little girl tomorrow,” says Tim.
The treatment, says Eleanor, “makes me feel rubbish. My energy is all drained. Sometimes I’m a bit sick.” This is an understatement, her father gently points out. “It’s turned our lives upside down,” he says of her illness.
Eleanor is learning to read Braille and walks with a cane. So how, amid all the upheaval, practical and emotional, has she managed to make her acting debut in a top London theatre?
It hadn’t exactly been the plan. Eleanor had attended a few charityrun drama workshops for visually impaired children. One day, the charity emailed parents to say a casting agency was on the lookout for a physically disabled child. Her mum Kelly, a 38-year-old credit controller, was initially unsure.
“Eleanor had just finished a year’s chemotherapy and Kelly said no, it would be too much pressure for her to even go for an audition, let alone get [the part],” says Tim.
Then they received another email, again asking parents if they’d like to audition their child. “This time they’d changed the audition date to my late mum’s birthday and I thought, ‘This is an omen, let’s let her experience it’,” says Tim. “Kelly relented and agreed.”
When they broached the subject with Eleanor, she was keen. After the first audition she was called back.
“They said, ‘We’ll let you know’,” recalls Tim. “We went away thinking, ‘Is this really happening? It’s like a dream.’ We had two weeks of absolutely terrible anxiety when we didn’t hear anything from them, then we couldn’t wait any longer so we phoned them and they rang back the next day and said, ‘She’s got the part.’”
After years of illness and uncertainty to cope with, the family were elated. “I felt amazing,” says Eleanor. “Mummy said she was going to get something and ran upstairs.
Afterwards she told me she was actually in her room, jumping up and down with excitement.”
Eleanor converted her lines into Braille on her own Braille machine and set about memorising them. The play opened towards the end of November, and the day of her debut rolled around. “Before my first performance I felt really nervous at home and didn’t feel well,” she says. “Then I got on the train and I was really excited and kept asking my chaperones [at the theatre], ‘How many more minutes until I actually go up there?’”
Her very limited vision allows her to see the contrast between the stage and the audience because she can differentiate between light and dark. Beyond this, she can only gauge their reaction to her scenes by their sounds of appreciation. She uses Tiny Tim’s stick as she would her cane.
“During her scenes there’s a lot of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs,’ says Tim. “Tiny Tim dying is a very emotional scene and there are people crying, even grown men.”
They are not the only ones for whom the play is somewhat transformative.
“When Eleanor came out of her debut performance, her face had changed,” says her father. “She’s drained from the treatment but she was beaming, there was colour in it, and it was phenomenal. It was like it had given her a new lease of life and it is the same every time now, she’s just buzzing afterwards. I think it helps her general wellbeing, doing something such as this, and the admiration she gets, because sometimes we go down in the bar afterwards and… if people recognise her, they’re clapping.”
Eleanor chimes in: “I love that feeling!” Her family believes she may be the youngest blind female actor ever to appear on a West End stage.
She knows she’ll feel sad when the play closes, but hopes to continue with extracurricular drama. Meanwhile, healthwise, “we’re in this for a long time,” says her father. Low-grade gliomas are usually benign but Eleanor has also been diagnosed with a second, smaller tumour, which means Eleanor’s is malignant, he explains. Eleanor will continue with chemotherapy until April 2021 although a scan last week showed her main tumour is now showing signs of shrinkage. “It might only be temporary but this is the best news we’ve had in almost five years,” Tim says.
He and Kelly are brimming with pride at what their daughter has achieved against a backdrop of suffering no one so young should have to reckon with.
The praise she gets helps her wellbeing