Expression

Just back from No. 2 Son's Bugsy Malone. He looked embarrassed, but then, he often does.
It is extraordinary how much a child who can inhabit the stage sticks out. Most of them are doing what they have understood as the thing to do. So you get a sort of strobe effect, where the required gesture is attempted, but immediately abandoned, only a moment later to be attempted again. They are just repeating things that someone else expressed and the expression struggles to get beyond the end of their eyebrows. All you see is their awkwardness; nothing that is not them comes across.

But there was one boy tonight - he must have been about 8 or 9 - whose voice bounced off the back wall and whose performance was characterised by gusto. That is, it had a quality that was not a function of his attention span, but something expressed, something that was not about him.