This is a Match is an original production inspired by This is a Ball, a picture book by Beck and Matt Stanton, aimed at intergenerational shared reading. In the book everything is wrong, starting with an error on the cover itself, with a cube drawn under the title. This is followed by checking of geometric shape, identity, and content of the three images. As soon as the (adult) reader and the (child) listener have agreed on the answers, a journey can begin, winding through mistakes, misunderstandings and lies. The story then never ends – “This is not the end of the book”, it says on the last page. 
In contemporary post-factual society, the concomitant skills of communication are coming to the fore, and often the person who has a better grasp of them is the one who is right. This shift from content to form is a case for an urgent appeal to return to the skill of articulating the nuances of experience, thought, knowledge. Although the skill of communication is the most important of all that humans possess, it is rarely taught in a devised way. We learn to speak and communicate with our fellow humans in the first years of our lives, which is why most of us think that we learn to communicate simply by learning to speak and listen. But this is not the case. Successful interpersonal communication does not happen automatically.  
Following the introductory reading of the picture book, the creators of the show have embarked on a playful journey of exploring speech and words in order to arouse interest in them, as well as elicit affection, curiosity and a desire to domesticate them. They knead and shape the words into a toy as a means of communication; they compete in word games and tongue twisters, as they put words into sound and meaningful relationships. They travel to foreign languages and try out the sounds of whistling-ish, clucking-ish, clapping-ish. They also persist in the state of wordlessness, with the aim to raise, in the absence, the taste, flexibility, and malleability of words, which allows us to hear and understand, assert that we are in the right, and makes us faster, stronger, more intelligible, more persuasive and expressive, as well as use them to reveal and change ourselves, interpret the world and position ourselves in it, grow (and grow up). 
The show presents a match as a competition against oneself, transcending of oneself. Comparison with oneself brings extra personal points as personal development is achieved in collaboration with the other(s), while we rejoice in progress together. We laugh when the other person finds a good argument and proves to be right in their own way. And learning is turned into a generous societal race for a better world.

What can children teach adults?