Who Had it Worse – Gary Coleman, or the Castrati?

The peak of Gary Coleman’s fame – and the length of his life – both seem poignantly short. Nobody can be a child star forever, even if they can avoid physically growing. We sometimes forget how important child stars have been to the history of drama: no women acted on Shakespeare’s stages during his lifetime, and a voice breaking must have been a catastrophe for a company. In the past, there have been hideous ways of sustaining the careers of boys with beautiful voices. The cruelty of gelding meant that the castrati could command the best roles, high fees and the right to dump in arias of their choice in the middle of operas, regardless of their relevance.

Coleman’s own problems didn’t manage to sustain him in this way. He became awkward; he developed drug problems; he ended up being a parody of himself. (He tried to sue the creators of Avenue Q, a musical, because there was a character based on him in it, singing, “It sucks to be me”. But clearly it did suck.) Even in the televised divorce court, his ex-wife, not long an adult herself, could describe his tantrums and make him sound like a five-year-old.

In Shakespeare’s time, some theatres realised that you could do whole plays with children – they would play the men as well as the women. These ventures were so successful that they could run to internal lighting. But what was so attractive about watching boys play adults? It was kind of funny, perhaps, but they were also good; there was a bitter-sweet dissonance between the player and the part, just as one could never shake the feeling that Coleman was a boyish wiseass. It’s what makes Ben Jonson’s poem about a child actor so touching. In his epitaph for Salomon Pavey, who died in 1602, the Fates are so convinced that Pavey really is an old man that, after he has had three years of fame, they take him by mistake. (Coleman managed eight years in Diff’rent Strokes.) The poet tries to comfort us by saying that the boy will always be young in heaven; and that the Fates

have sought (to give new birth)
In bathes to steep him;
But, being so much too good for earth,
Heaven vows to keep him.