Viva Lewes Issue #143 August 2018

COLUMN
Chloë King
The last larp?
It’s a blisteringly hot Sunday
afternoon and I’m in the car
with the family and a giant
chocolate cake.
The cake is four times the
size of a regular cake. It contains
three jars of blackcurrant
jam, 1200g of sugar, and
mercifully, you might say, is
entirely vegan. The lack of
dairy and eggs, however, is,
to my disappointment, doing
nothing to prevent my infant
daughter from becoming
increasingly fractious in the back seat.
I’m on my way to Linda’s Birthday Party, a larp
event hosted by artist Adam James at Liddicoat &
Goldhill Project Space in Margate. Larp stands
for Live Action Role Play, and Mr, as a more
experienced larper, informs me it’s akin to ‘taking
play very seriously’.
The medium spans medieval and Harry Potterinspired
fantasy re-enactments to obscure Nordic-style
games that evoke life dramas, immersive
dance, Lars von Trier and the abyss. It’s becoming
an increasingly popular pastime for many reasons.
Essentially, larp is enjoyed for its ability to transport
you out of your everyday routine, giving the
chance to meet new people, and unknown parts
of yourself, through playing the role of another in
an organised scenario.
Linda’s Birthday Party is a short chamber larp for
which a group of adults become guests at a sixyear-old’s
birthday party. For two hours, I will play
parent to a collection of rowdy, sugared-up adultkids,
hence why my cake is designed to Alice-in-
Wonderland proportions. As parent to an actual
six-year-old this borders on meta. What might I
learn by acting myself in a twisted re-enactment
of my average weekend’s
entertainment?
The event starts with my
arriving late. I’m rarely
early to children’s birthday
parties and so I blunder
into the room, sweating
profusely, waving a hasty
goodbye to my two mildlytroubled
genuine children.
After a hasty warm-up of
Grandma’s Footsteps and
Simon Says, we start with
my opening the door.
I instinctively adopt a sickening tone of voice
somewhere between Hyacinth Bucket and Mr
Tumble, and then the game promptly continues
with lunch. This, I find difficult. You would never,
never, start a child’s party with lunch and, true to
my fears, the meal quickly descends into a war
that lasts the rest of the game. There follow tears,
avoidance, theft, shouting, gorging, dancing, cuddling,
crying, disobedience, recklessness, bubble
bursting, impersonation, defecation and exclusion.
It’s frankly all I can do to hover, administering
shoulder hugs and bubbles and sweeping up
around them.
At the debrief, a player remarks how exhausting it
is to be children, how much we wrongfully lionize
this time that is so inherently fraught. I’m not
sure. I’m not sure I have ever witnessed six-yearolds
fighting to the degree exhibited today. Then
my four-year-old ‘son’ remarks with genuine
sadness that he felt overlooked all afternoon. I
think of my own children having been dragged
to Margate on a sweltering Sunday and the mask
slips. I’m no longer Linda’s Mother, but I’m still
wearing the stuck-on smile that says: us adults,
we’re all living in fear of being found out.
Illustration by Chloë King
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