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I have seen the squirrel bureau in action. It plays a small (and pretty much insignificant) role in the village production of an immersive theatre telling of the Narnia story. I didn’t think every village you move to outside of London has its own theatre experience in the woods, but maybe they do.
I thought I was the avant garde force in the community, bringing my transgressive theatre of snooker and stone clearing, but here were other villagers bringing theatre to the fields of Hertfordshire. Arguably better than a man clearing stones.
It’s more likely that it’s another stroke of luck for us more or less randomly choosing a place to live after getting frustrated by the house hunting process. Just over five years ago we were all set to move into a house near Hertford, but with days left to the exchange the vendors withdrew. At the time I was annoyed that they had caused us to spend thousands of pounds unnecessarily, but I think it was a stroke of luck. I often wonder what course our lives would have taken had we lived in that other house. It would certainly be substantially different. And as a result so would yours. And pretty much everyone else’s in the world. Not because we are particularly significant people, but just because a change like that has a domino effect, just like every decision made by every person.
Probably no stone clearing for a start and it doesn’t bear thinking about the world where that podcast doesn’t exist.
Anyway, I am glad we ended up here.
I didn’t know if the production would be an am dram affair (and I wasn’t particularly bothered if it was) but it was very professional, with great performances and effects and a genuine sense of danger as we trudged up muddy slopes in the dark. I wondered how they were going to realise Aslan and wondered who’d be in the tatty lion suit, but they managed to make that work rather beautifully too with lights and puppetry. The kids were totally engaged by it all, mildly scared in places, but delighted to get a chocolate brownie in the house of Mr and Mr Beaver (I don’t know what CS Lewis would feel about this gender shift, but I thought it was ace). The young actors indulged our kids on the walk back after the play was over and pretended to offer them parts in the later performance. Ernie said he wanted to be a donkey (even though there hadn’t been one in the play) and seemed to think he was coming back at 7.30pm to dance and bray.
Although it was very much a truncated 80 minute or so performance of the story, it hit all the main points
The cold meant that I spent most of the performance needing a wee and you’d think that being in a dark wood would be the ideal theatre to relieve yourself mid-performance, but things moved fast and I just had to hold it in or risk my micturition becoming part of the action.
We were only at this performance because we’d happened to walk past them setting up for yesterday’s show and found out that they had this spare tickets. Literally every second of every day for every person is Sliding Doors. Make a film about that Joey from Bread.
