David McKee’s ‘Not Now, Bernard’ is one of the weirdest and – in its way – most haunting entries in the pre-school picture book canon. It concerns the eponymous young boy, who buzzes around his parents’ house, playing with his toys, only to keep getting told to push off via the words ‘not now, Bernard’.
Eventually, he tells his mum that he can see a monster in the garden that wants to eat him; ‘not now, Bernard’, she says, and soon the purple furry monster does indeed devour him and comes in to wreck the house. The monster, of course, is still Bernard, driven to acting up by his parents’ lack of attention. But there’s no resolution: his parents continue to ignore him, with the final inference simply that he’ll doubtless feel better tomorrow.
The book, created in 1980 by McKee – best known for his enduring patchwork elephant creation Elmer – is something of a classic, and if it seems a splash bleak, it's worth remembering that it’s a very brief read that’s pepped up with memorable illustrations.
Now it’s a 40-minute stage play for ages three-to-six, adapted and directed by Sarah Argent. My three-year-old spent the first 20 minutes intermittently enquiring ‘where monster?’ before being generally satisfied and delighted when Guy Rhys’s Bernard donned his purple suit and started wrecking stuff up.
I found it all curiously melancholic: stage adaptations of picture books almost always overcome the brevity of the story by bulking it out with jaunty songs. That doesn’t happen here: instead, Bernard, Mum (Bea Holland) and Dad (Ben Adams) drift about Natalie Pryce’s acid-bright set in a peculiar, washed out, near-silent daze, soundtracked by Owen Crouch’s lysergic live score. More hypnotic than tedious, it nonetheless conveys some of the jangling boredom of activity free childhood hours.
The main event begins when the monster eats and replaces Bernard, a potentially frightening moment that most of the young audience seems to take reasonably in their stride. The monster’s subsequent rampage is undoubtedly a lot of fun, but I still found it oddly horrifying that Bernard’s parents persist in ignoring him, right up to the last.
I am acutely aware that I’m perhaps over-scrutinising a piece of kids’ entertainment that my toddler described in summary as ‘scary and good’. But in all honesty, I found this extended version of the story fairly bleak, a portrait of unending, unmitigated parental neglect in which the purple monster is a curiously impotent player (perhaps this just goes to show I have a horribly over-attentive patenting style, I dunno). Good fun for children, but perhaps a bit frightening for adults inclined towards overthinking.