From the mouths of babes: we basically are the Queen's prisoners
After one performer sticks a single hand in the air, all the others follow, focused and quiet and facing the front. They're being good, and this familiar gesture of assumed power and control neatly sets up the difference between adult-child conversations and child-child conversations. The ones that fill Chris Goode's show, Monkey Bars, are just as funny and sweet as they are solemn and provocative.
The follow-the-leader, lemming-like gesture, used to get a classroom of kids to quiet down, tends to creep me out. This is how all my teacher friends talk about their classes, especially the supply teachers. They talk about discipline techniques and calming dozens of kids like they're bee keepers and half their job is to stop these creatures from swarming. Admittedly, I'm a little detached.
But Monkey Bars, which takes conversations between children and gives them stage space via adult performers in suits and ties, presents a collection of very individual voices. So although most of the material is from children, it's all about what adults can learn from them, what they've absorbed from our world and why we really shouldn't underestimate them.
For me, it also questioned the benefits of such purposeful dialogue with children. I've always associated these kinds of exercises, where children are asked 'how do you feel about that?' with things like debate club and Gifted & Talented classes. That is, extra-curricular activities designed to help children express their ideas, a million miles away from the seen but not heard days that we assume we've left far behind. Although it now seems obvious, I hadn't, until Monkey Bars, thought about how adults can evaluate themselves thanks to eloquent, unafraid children.
And these kids in particular are brilliant. They talk about nightmares and careers, religion and war, bubblegum and Haribo and after a tax debate one of them comes to the conclusion that we're all the Queen's prisoners. Their conversations are at their theatrical best when they're presented in adult situations so that a discussion about how to explain money to aliens takes place over drinks at a bar. Similarly, when a girl talks about a story she's written, she may as well be at Hay Festival.
To me, the show dipped when it strayed from this effective format. But the range of material it explores makes up for it. Still, it leaves me with questions about the process of selection. Although this captures kids at their best, at a time when our practial, real-life interactions with children are so often based on the assumption that they're whiny attention-seekers, how much nonsense did Goode and dialogue artist Karl James have to sift through to get these gems? How many shy, reluctant kids did they face before they met these confident chatterboxes? And will we always need to see their words via adults to really listen to them?
Monkey Bars did brilliantly at Edinburgh and its run at Unicorn Theatre last year was a huge hit. I don't know anyone who wouldn't be completely won over by it. 
Monkey Bars runs at Unicorn Theatre until 26th January
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