Show time and a time for words

It was an evening of firsts.

The minor one was my first theatre visit in Spain. We used to be keen theatregoers in London years ago, but rather lost the habit after moving abroad. And, certainly, given how slow our progress towards mastery of the language (mastery! I’d settle for mere competence), we haven’t been at all since arriving in Spain.

But the really important first was Matilda’s. It was this granddaughter’s first time in a theatre anywhere. In any language. 

Matilda luxuriating in her theatre seat

Now, since Matilda’s two, you can probably guess that we weren’t there for one of the great classic plays of the Spanish renaissance. No rolling cadences, no rhyming couplets. Which is just as well, since I’d have probably understood even less of it than Matilda. Instead we got an excellent performance, with a wide range of characters even thought there were only two actors. Highly talented actors, both of them, but just two.

It was curious. There was plenty of what I suppose one can think of as entirely transparent marionette play. You could see the actors holding the marionettes and moving their hands or heads around with little rods in their back, but they did the voices and the movements so well, that it was easy to suspend belief and accept that we were really watching the characters represented.

The story conveyed a universal and important message. The central character, played by the woman actor as human not a puppeteer – and she was a woman, not a girl, though again it was easy to believe in her as a girl – had lost the capacity for excitement. She spends the day hunting for excitement in all sorts of places, meeting all sorts of other characters, but never tracking excitement itself down.

On the other hand, at the end of this day of questing, she realises that she’s had a tremendously exciting time. So clearly she’s found plenty of excitement in the process of failing to find excitement. A clever, witty paradox, full of subtle meaning and intelligent reflections on life. An excellent lesson to communicate to young kids – I think Matilda was the youngest – which the show did particularly well for being performed so skilfully. 

Matilda’s attention wasn’t held the whole time. But it kept coming back to the stage. And I think the magic of sitting with an audience in a large, darkened area while everyone focused on the brightly-lit stage – the magic of the theatre, in fact – communicated itself to her. It helped, too, that though the action of the story lasts a day, the performance lasted an hour. Intelligent writing by people who understand the concentration span of young children.

The fascination of the theatre

How much did Matilda understand? Well, it’s long long been known that kids understand language far, far sooner than they can produce it themselves. This is now entirely clear with her in English. She’s so good at doing what we ask her to do, and with alacrity, that we’ve smartened up to the fact that when she doesn’t, it’s not because she hasn’t understood the instruction – I’m sorry, this being Matilda, I should have said request – but that she has chosen not to comply.

I don’t know, by any direct means, how well her Spanish is advancing. Probably a lot better than mine (see above). In term time, on weekdays, she spends six hours at school and, while for part of that time she’s asleep, for most of it she’s active and focused, in an entirely Spanish environment.

That school strikes me as an extraordinary institution. I suppose many in England would be inclined to see it as merely child care. And so it is, in a sense. But it’s childcare provided by qualified teachers, doing intelligent work: the kids work with plants to learn about the environment, they draw, they paint, and of course they work on language. Immersion language teaching. And all for free.

Indeed, some of Matilda’s first words were Spanish. ‘Hola’ is what she says to strangers in the street, generally causing them to dissolve in delight when she does. To this day, and even with her English-speaking family, ‘agua’ is the word for water and what she asks for when she’s thirsty. On the other hand, when she wants a drink with more flavour, the word is ‘juice’.

There was no doubt she was saying ‘more’ when she felt we hadn’t given her enough food, even though the word came across more as ‘mare’ or even, a little, as ‘may’. But just a couple of days ago, a clear, definitive ‘more’ emerged. Not only is she learning the language, she’s learning to to produce it correctly. 

She’s also beginning to combine words as well, as so ‘no agua’ tells us clearly that the thirst is quenched, thank us very much, and it’s time to move on to catering to her other requirements.

That’s quite interesting, as it happens, because ‘no’ in Matilda’s vocabulary is clearly English, with a nice round ‘o’ to rhyme with ‘sow’. ‘Yes’, on the other hand, is ‘si’.

Now I know I shouldn’t read too much into any of this, but you know how it is with humans. We see symbolism of deeper truth everywhere we look. I’m no exception.

Affirmation in the language of a proud nation that has nonetheless understood, after a horrible civil war and 40 years of dictatorship, that its future of peace and democracy is best secured in association with its neighbours in the European Union. And that the small loss of national sovereignty is a small to pay for the benefit.

While negation is expressed in the language of sad little Brexitland, sure that it’s still a global power though that slipped through its hands over half a century ago. The voice of a declining nation that is only now beginning to contemplate the wretched consequences of its 2016 decision. The nation that left the very Union to which Spain contributes and from which it benefits.

At two, Matilda seems to have got all that pretty much right.