Adventures at Home at the theatre: The Snow Spider

Anne-Marie Piazza, Philip Benjamin (centre) and Joey Hickman in THE SNOW SPIDER.  

Presented by Io Theatre Company and Ovalhouse Theatre.  Photo by Stefan Lacandler.

My children are experienced theatre-goers, and love a good show. Last week we were invited to a performance of a new children's play presented by Io Theatre Company and the Ovalhouse Theatre - The Snow Spider. Despite us not being familiar with the story, adapted from the children's novel by Jenny Nimmo, I felt confident my two children would like it. What I hadn't expected was its sad and complex themes  - would my children enjoy or even understand such a serious play?

Although the auditorium's heating was on full blast, causing a rather stifling atmosphere, we were most effectively transported to the cold and snowy Welsh mountains - where the story of Gwyn, a nine year old boy, and his sad, fractured family begins. The atmosphere is created by a stark, minimal set, and the talented cast who play violins, a harp, drums and other percussive instruments to evoke the wind, rain and snow of the winter weather, and the anger, sadness and occasional but diminishing flashes of joy of Gwyn's family. The use of musical motif, by James Lark the production's composer, is particularly effective in introducing a most important ingredient - magic; the glimmer of hope, the dangerously powerful driving force of the story. 

Magic begins to enter the lives of Gwyn's family through his eccentric grandmother played brilliantly by Anne-Marie Piazza. Even though the actor is notably pretty and clearly youthful, she plays the elderly, naughty, child-cum-matriarch with aplomb and humour, and all without the mask of a grey wig or ageing make-up. In fact the playing of numerous characters, differing wildly in age, required of all the actors didn't phase this young cast at all. When I asked my daughter how she knew someone had become a different person in the story she told me, 'It was easy, mummy. They just put on something like a hat or a pair of shoes, and changed their attitude.' 

The clever, multiple use of props and objects to create scenery was thoroughly enjoyed by my children too - the plank of wood that became a door, a seat, and a table, for example - and they liked the cheeky physicality of the acting too - Gwyn, played by Joey Hickman, climbing the craggy mountain peak made of people was particularly admired. But it was the Snow Spider herself which they thought had been most cleverly realised, and they found her appearance spell-binding.

This production of the The Snow Spider is truly spun with magic, but it addresses really complex and sad issues like death, grief, and families falling apart. This is pretty serious stuff for my two children (aged six and seven), and I wonder just how much they understood. However, the actors' lilting Welsh accents, the haunting music and confident storytelling kept them immersed in the tale, and even if my children didn't get the full meaning of the arrival and subsequent departure of the mysterious new friend, for example - there was no doubt in their minds that a good story had been told, and a magical afternoon had been had by all.

Ovalhouse and Io Theatre Company present The Snow Spider
Adapted by Io Theatre Company from the award-winning novel by Jenny Nimmo
31 October - 17 November, Ovalhouse, Theatre downstairs
Box office 020 7582 7680

Our Burns Night supper

A traditional Burns Night supper is usually held to commemorate the eighteenth century poet Robert Burns' birthday. It might include drinking Scotch whisky, eating haggis and 'neeps and tatties', reading poems by Burns, Scotland's most famous poet, and singing Auld Lang Syne. We celebrated our Scottish heritage tonight with a kid-friendly version. We made a few changes - I hope not too irreverent - and I must say, we had a fine time of it. 

Instead of whisky we each drank a 'wee dram' of apple juice, and we substituted a meaty haggis with a veggie version (pictured below). This is made from a mixture of oatmeal, spices, beans, lentils and vegetables stuffed into a heatproof casing, and not a sheep's stomach - as is traditional.

After baking it for an hour in a shallow dish of water, I arranged it so it looked like a kind of rare Scottish beast as pictured below. Now I know it's this kind of thing that propagates the well-known misconception that a haggis is actually a wild animal, but I just couldn't resist. And just in case no one liked the haggis I cooked a few sausages on the side. No one liked the haggis.

Instead of 'neeps  and tatties' (turnips and potatoes) we mashed potato and carrots with plenty of butter. I'm pleased to say these were much more popular than the grizzly veggie monster.

During dinner, instead of Burns' poetry, we enjoyed a fabulous Scottish story about a boy and his bagpipes called You can't play Here by Angus Corby. And at the end of our meal, in place of the traditional Burns' song Auld Lang Syne, we listened to the music of Scottish band - The Proclaimers. My six-year-old son wrapped the McKenzie tartan table runner around his waist like a kilt, and both children danced their little hearts out to the track I'm gonna be (500 miles).

I knew I wouldn't be able to cope with any rendition of Burns' Ae Fond Kiss tonight - it's just too sad - so we finished our Scottish evening by listening to The Proclaimers' waltz Sunshine on Leith. This, however, turned out to be just as moving as the song I'd been avoiding; I ended up in tears at the 'beauty and kindness' of my dear children as they sang and danced along with this wonderful and poignant song. 

So here to mark Burns Night, and all things Scottish, are not the words of Robert Burns but those of The Proclaimers; I like to think he would have approved.

Sunshine on Leith

My heart was broken, my heart was broken 
Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow, sorrow 
My heart was broken, my heart was broken 

You saw it, you claimed it 
You touched it, you saved it 

My tears are drying, my tears are drying 
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you 
My tears are drying, my tears are drying 
[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsfreak.com/p/proclaimers/sunshine+on+leith_20111485.html ] 
Your beauty and kindness 
Made tears clear my blindness 
While I'm worth my room on this earth 
I will be with you 
While the chief, puts sunshine on Leith 
I'll thank him for his work 
And your birth and my birth. 

My heart was broken, my heart was broken 
Sorrow Sorrow Sorrow Sorrow 
My heart was broken, my heart was broken 

While I'm worth my room on this earth 
I will be with you 
While the chief, puts sunshine on Leith 
I'll thank him for his work 
And your birth and my birth. 

                                                          [lyrics from Lyricsfreak.com]

Dream home

Sometimes, just sometimes, I daydream. I imagine that we have a big house... a playroom... a large garden... oodles of storage space - a garage, an attic, a basement. Then... then I imagine how we store, zone and rotate the children's toys, how we have a nature table, a dedicated messy area, an art studio, cosy reading nooks, a home corner, a tinker table and... my oh my - I do get a bit carried away. As you may have guessed I have a penchant for reading those gorgeous blogs with aspirational child-focussed yet stylish interiors, so it's no wonder I occasionally drift off into visions of a dream home...

But then I think - hang on a minute - I love our home. Yes, it's small; we have no attic, basement, garage or playroom and only a tiny backyard - but when I really think about it I realise that this is the perfect house for our family. I remember how I actually enjoy the challenge of finding the best ways of using the space; ways that nurture play and adventure, learning and working, relaxing and socialising. The rooms have to be multi-functional and we have thrived here - a happy family within its parameters. Its limitations have encouraged us to think creatively and as a result we definitely get the best out of it.

The grown-ups' bedroom is by no means a child-free area. It has, in the last couple of months alone, been a hospital, a lion's den and a snowy mountain, with Arctic animals and Lego snow speeders. And it's the official Trampoline Room of course - but I think all homes have one of those, don't they?

Our spare room is an office, a music studio and guest bedroom. It is not a dumping ground for the laundry, luggage, outgrown clothes and broken toys. It is not.

The dark entrance hall has been the perfect setting for our Little Light Theatre and the landing is simply the place for long HotWheels track set-ups.

By day, the living room is full of train tracks, marble runs, Lego constructions, books, large art installations and home-made dens. It has, on many occasions, been a pet parlour, a general store, an obstacle course, a light-sabre battle zone, a library, a yoga space, a dance studio and a cinema.

Our dining table - where I write - is not only our work station but also our sewing, craft, printing, drawing, painting and spelling-practice surface. Occasionally we eat at it too.

Our little garden is just as versatile; we take all our play out there if the weather is fine, and the wet and really messy stuff goes on out there too. We try to grow flowers and herbs - although I do tend to kill most plants in the end. The squirrels, bugs and birds that find themselves within its leafy confines are luckier - they can leave when they will, but we love to observe their comings and goings.

The kitchen is the one room in our house that sticks to tradition; it is small, so there's little scope for alternatives. Of course we involve the children in the usual cooking and baking, washing up and laundry that goes on in there. The wine drinking and wind-down chat of the later evening? Not so much.

So who needs a playroom? Our whole home is a playroom. And that's just the way we like it.

[We've joined It's Playtime this week. Pop over to see who else is playing.]

'Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside...'

'...I do like to be beside the sea.' So goes the popular music hall ditty by John A. Glover-Kind.

But if you don't like it, or can't easily get there, here are five ways to recreate a bit of British seaside magic in your own backyard.

1) Fill a bag ready for your beach trip.

I prepared one for my Under Fives group at the Geffrye Museum and we began the session by unpacking it together to establish our theme. At home I simply handed over the huge bag of goodies to very a excited Buddy and Daisy.

In our beach bag they found:

• beach towels
• sun-cream
• sunglasses
• sun-hats
• buckets and spades
• a fishing net
• toy binoculars (for spotting ships)
• a magnifying glass (for rock pool investigation)
• pots of seashells and pebbles
• a toy bristle worm and anenome
• bath-time toys; fishes, sea creatures and boats
• a mini home-made kite

When they announced 'Let's play seasides' I knew Buddy and Daisy would be occupied for a while. Using the paddling pool, already out in the garden, they became happily involved in creating their own imaginary world; they sunbathed, 'applied' sun-cream, and filled the pool with pebbles, sea creatures and fish - scooping them up with their nets and plopping them back in the water over and over again.

2) Make your own rock pool - a physical and musical activity.

At the museum, with about 15 children, we made our own huge imaginary rock pool. Sitting in a circle we threw in invisible pebbles, and pretended to be seaweed - waving our arms when underwater, and making crunchy, rigid shapes when exposed to the air. Then the children entered the rock pool like sea creatures; we had crabs, starfish, anenomes, jelly fish, bristle worms and there was even a shark in there - I told you it was a big rock pool. I played them Saint-Saens' Aquarium from The Carnival of the Animals and responding to the music they danced, swam, crawled and shimmied around. The water was provided by the grown-ups in attendance - they wafted a large piece of turquoise chiffon about a metre above the children. We also played a fun variation of Sleeping Bunnies (Sleeping Sea Creatures) - altering the lyrics slightly; all under the undulating blue fabric. It was all very under-the-sea; beautiful and magical.

[No photos of this, I was too busy playing...]

3) Read a story about a rock pool adventure.

We had the wonderful Julia Donaldson's Sharing A Shell - such a fun story starring a hermit crab, a bristle worm and a sea anenome. It has great glittery and shimmery rock pool pictures and plenty opportunities for counting and joining in.

'Three friends sharing a shell

happy as house-mates can be,

rocketing all round the rock pool

in their wonderful home for three.'

4) Make your own seaside souvenir; a paper plate rock pool.

We used:

• paper plates - we had blue plates, but of course watery paint colours could be added to create the background
• shredded paper seaweed - or use shredded leaves from your garden or local park
• pebble-printed paper - or use gravel mixed with PVA glue
• neoprene shells and sea creature pictures or stickers - or draw onto plain sticky labels
• pipe-cleaner bristle worms
• lots of silver glitter mixed with PVA glue to stick everything down and make your rock pool shimmer in the seaside sunlight

And after all that exertion...

5. Share some good old-fashioned Fish & Chips for tea.

Just playing...

..from the moment they woke up until it was time to go to sleep.

It was Teddy Tommy's birthday apparently, so that meant playing shops (to buy his presents)...

Making him a birthday feast with home-made glittery play-dough...

And hosting a birthday tea party.

There was hard work at the car-wash (well, scooter and bicycle-wash)...

And help with essential bike maintenance before our ride...

...to the perfect spot for some rock hopping...

... and stick and stone collecting for mummy (why, thank you!)

There was bubble blowing...

Star Wars spacecraft design...

..and some galaxy-defending.

We had sticker-sticking whilst singing 'Somewhere over the rainbow'...

Drumming...

Playing spy and princess music on the keyboard...

...and, once they were in bed and should have been asleep, they told me what they planned to play tomorrow.

Happy times at home then. I cherish days like these.

Listen with mother?

Happiness is .... sunny yellow tulips, a clutter-free table and my radio.

I love my radio; I crave its company when I'm home alone, and I like the atmosphere it creates when the house is busy. With its warm sound and perfect around-the-house portability it's my lovely friend who knows exactly what I want to hear, when and where I want to hear it.

I do shift around the radio stations a fair bit but my children are most familiar with Classic FM (tinkling upliftingly in the background), Thomas the Tank Engine stories on Fun Radio (if we're at home at 4pm) or rock classics on Absolute (air-guitars at the ready). I keep Radio Four for lone car journeys (very rare occasions) when I have the chance to actually hear the reports and discussions rather than my children's very important things they need to tell me that always seem to coincide with any attempt to tune in.

Buddy and Daisy are of course still developing their listening skills and are at the stage where if they are really enjoying something they simply cannot hold in their feelings about it (some people never grow out of that, I know). But happily this is resulting in some wonderfully creative responses. For example, when listening to their current vinyl favourites (we've got a just-about-working 1960s HMV record player), an old Disney film soundtrack and an ABBA Greatest Hits album, they sing along and dance around to the tunes, reminding us to flip-over the record when each side has finished. A recent audio-book craze resulted in them listening over and over to Aliens Love Underpants whilst acting out the whole story along with the narration. Hilarious.

And they simply wow us with their responses to film soundtracks. When we purchased the music from Disney Pixar's WALL-E recently they listened to it in its entirety - captivated. Buddy knows exactly what happens in the film at every incidental or full piece of music and of course shares his thoughts with us - this is when he doesn't recognise EVE - this is when EVE shows she can fly high in the sky - this is when she starts him up again and he loses his memory. If we put on a soundtrack of a familiar film now, it's usually the starting point for some fantastic imaginative play.

So, though Buddy and Daisy might not be ready for Today in Parliament just yet, they clearly love the music and stories radio and other audio technology offer, and long may their enthusiastic response last. And in the meantime I can always find an excuse to drive somewhere during Woman's Hour if I really need to.