Babies on stage at the Fringe

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Never work with animals or children, they say, yet kids and babies seem to be appearing on a surprising number of stages these days. Amanda Palmer was accompanied by her 10-month-old when she performed at the David Bowie Prom while, here at the Fringe, Grace the Former Child (she’s 13) has already completed her second stand-up run.

Not that she’s the only underage veteran in town. Last year saw the Fringe debut of Daddy & Robin, aka clown Cammy Sinclair and his son Robin, now four. They’re back this year with Lightbulb, a show for all ages in which the lines between performers and audience, and between showtime and playtime, are pretty much erased. It’s a gleefully silly half-hour of songs, gags, drawing and games in which the audience are dragooned into service, often to the accompaniment of Robin’s nifty drumming or forthright commentary. Highlights include alphabet juggling and a canny conceptual reinterpretation of Pump Up the Jam.

Come Look at the Baby brings a weirdly purist ‘anti-theatrical’ approach to the idea of children on stage. It ostensibly does what it says on the tin: for half an hour, under a pastel-coloured gazebo to soothing ambient music, a seven-month-old baby dandles on its granny’s lap, gurgling, laughing, crying, wriggling, playing with toys, yawning and doing what babies do, while granny talks and tends. There’s no acknowledgement of the audience, let alone interaction. My initial response was to smile and coo as you do when you see a cute baby. Then came a queasy feeling of voyeurism (remember Kiddystare from The Day Today?). Then a surprising cascade of often awkward questions.

Does this show exist because fewer people have babies in their lives as a matter of course since the decline of the extended family? Does the fact of adults applauding an infant for sneezing illustrate the craven fetishisation of the child in our society? Is this a kind of public service, an oasis of raw emotion in the midst of Fringe madness? Or does the request for money – albeit a charity donation – reduce innocent human life to commodified consumer spectacle? Is this akin to smugly showing off your child on social media – a half-hour live-action selfie? Might the baby, who makes eye contact with us and smiles, stand for cabaret while granny, who bizarrely insists she “can’t see” us, represents fourth-wall theatre? Does her talking in French and Italian conjure the post-Brexit future in which this child will ostensibly grow? And how on earth are you meant to give a star rating to the experience of looking at a baby?

Unlike these productions, Lady Rizo: Multiplied actually takes new parenthood as its overt theme – or, as the cabaret dynamo puts it at the top of the show, “I got knocked up and had a human baby!” It’s a potentially mawkish theme but, as realised by Rizo and her talented accompanist Yair Evnine, Multiplied is an imaginative, considered and impassioned set.

In the context of cleverly reimagined numbers ranging from Kris Kristofferson’s Help Me Make It Through the Night to John Lennon’s Mother, it offers plenty of the love, hope and devotion conventionally associated with maternity but also engages with more complex feelings of internal conflict, familial resentment and ‘breeder shame’. Rizo talks of sleep deprivation and exhaustion – familiar feelings at the Fringe – and her energy levels understandably seem a notch or two down from their usual megawatt rate. That still leaves them way up there, though, as her masterful audience engagement, quick wit and extraordinarily sustained high notes testify.

The show’s coup de theatre comes when Rizo’s son, the infant Tennyson, is brought out for a feed, suckling, cradled in her arm, as she sings a sweet lullaby before the hushed and cooing audience. The cute factor certainly comes into play here but there’s more going on, in ways that are consistent with the radically open conception of performance that has long been hardwired into Rizo’s practice – and indeed her life, as described in stories about her upbringing in an intentional artists’ commune.

This act proposes that the stage should not be imagined as a separate, privileged zone but as part of life. The act of performance, like the act of breast feeding, should be recognised as natural and necessary, and the fact that we all have a direct stake in both of these things should be acknowledged and celebrated. There is a taboo in theatre around the direct engagement of the audience and there is a taboo in society around the overt nourishment of babies at women’s breasts. Neither taboo promotes progress or empathy and, in pushing back against both, Lady Rizo helps point the way to a new kind of tribe, a healthier community, nestled within the imagined comfort of her luxury womb.

There’s one other baby-related moment to report, this one from the second of the year’s three Cabaret Chinwag events (a panel-cum-mixer I put on at Fringe Central on Thursday afternoons). The rise of the babies brings to mind Lee Edelman’s fecund concept of ‘reproductive futurism’ – the notion that our culture’s focus on a certain idea of kids’ welfare (“think of the children!”) can function as an excuse to ignore the needs of current members of society, especially those outside conventional nuclear family set-ups, and to permanently defer political change. But, as Lady Rizo suggests, some children might also be seen as a radical army in waiting. At Cabaret Chinwag, Miss Annabel Sings of queer cabaret night Dive gave a lofi rendition of What a Wonderful World and, in an unplanned move, she did it holding a friend’s baby. There was an extra power to the lyrics about seeing babies cry and watching them grow. “You’ll learn so much more,” Annabel sang to Sophia, “than I’ll ever know. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.” There might be hope yet.

Coverage of Daddy & Robin: Lightbulb and Come Look at the Baby written for the Scotsman. Coverage of Lady Rizo: Multiplied and Cabaret Chinwag added for this blog post. Details of shows at edfringe.com.