Stage Fright on a Summer Night

Mary Pope Osborne's Stage Fright on a Summer Night is a theatre adventure for 7 year olds about a boy who is terrified of going on stage and ends up doing it in front of three thousand people.

What happens

Morgan le Fay turns up in the tree house with a job that is not really a job. She wants Jack and Annie to learn magic, and she leaves them a rhyme instead of an explanation.

Find a special magic. Step into the light. Turn daytime into night, without a wand or a spell.

The book takes them to London in 1600. The river stinks. The bridge is covered in shops and shouting. Huge black birds sit on the rooftops watching everybody go past.

Then a long-legged man with twinkly eyes hears Jack reading out loud and decides on the spot that this is the boy who can save his play. His name is Will. He has three thousand people waiting.

Annie thinks it sounds brilliant. Jack would rather do anything else in the world. The bit where Puck cheerfully explains that the groundlings sometimes throw rotten fruit, and please keep going if they do, is very funny if you are not Jack.

There is a nice sting in it too. Annie is told she cannot go on stage because girls are not allowed, so she has to tuck up her hair and be called Andy. She says it is not fair, and the book lets her be right about that.

One passage needs a warning. On the way to the theatre they pass the Bear Garden, and the research book explains plainly that people there watched bears fight with dogs. Annie finds a brown bear in a cage on a cart, head down, being taken to be sold for exactly that. She tries to open the cage and the owner shouts her away.

It is handled honestly rather than gruesomely, and the book says clearly that it is against the law now. But a child who cannot bear the idea of an animal being hurt will be upset by those few pages, and the bear is not forgotten afterwards.

For a reader who likes real history mixed into a story, this is one of the better ones. You come out knowing what a playhouse smelled like.

What to read next

For another day spent at the elbow of somebody famous, try Monday with a Mad Genius. Jack and Annie spend a whole working day helping Leonardo da Vinci, who paints, builds and invents in roughly equal measure.