BOY. To 8 June.

Young People

BOY
by Mike Kenny, adapted from Roald Dahl

Polka Theatre To 8 June 2002
Tue 4 June 2.30pm; Wed-Fri 5-7 June 11am & 2.30pm; Sat 8 June 2pm
Runs 1hr 35min One interval

TICKETS 020 8543 4888
Review Timothy Ramsden 1 June

Unhappy for some: a well-made play about Roald Dahl's schooling shows the origins of the author's nightmare adults.Mike Kenny makes just one mistake in adapting Roald Dahl's autobiographical book. He has the boarding-school boy Roald, testing chocolate bars sent him by Cadbury, muse that one day he'll write a story about a chocolate factory.

It's the kind of knowing whimsy avoided elsewhere in this neatly dramatised childhood world of a favourite children's storyteller, showing its influence on his fiction. As Laurence Moran's Dahl says, late in the play when he's reached the upper years of public school, the emphasis on physical punishment in his books reflects his hatred of the practice.

It's certainly been manifest, along with the piercing intensity of a child's sense of unfairness, throughout the play: caning as suppression, as a means of older pupils – Repton School's prefects, or boazers - asserting status, as a way of denying the young their voice. When his ex-military teacher sends Roald to the Head, mistakenly believing he's cheated, the Head's sole response is that Captain Hardcastle fought in the War, so can't be wrong.

World War One that is; the Norwegian Dahls came to south Wales and had their son educated there, then at an English school – the best, they believed, in the world – in the 1920s and 1930s. It was a dark world, if we take the author's word for it: Kenny is adapting, not commenting on how the Boy's temperament created its own version of reality – how much he was, even then, the storymaker. Moran's performance keeps a polite, tidy veneer. The injustice of beatings is most piercingly expressed by his schoolmate Thwaites, so sure his father will put all to rights. As, of course, never happens.

It's a dark world, of scratched wood panels, where adults outside the family are either poseurs to be preyed on, like big sister's manly lover, whose pipe gets stuffed with goat's dung, or masked terror-figures running institutions: unbending schoolmasters or Mrs Pratchett, the sour sweetshop-owner who ends up getting a dead mouse stuffed down her gob-stoppers.

Boy may tour Dahl's childhood rather than explore it, but it's still an enjoyable glimpse behind the popular stories to come.

Roald Dahl: Laurence Moran
Mother/Mrs Pratchett/Captain Hardcastle: Rebecca Turner
Sister/Thwaites/Boazer Wilberforce: Gemma Van Rensburg
Mr Coombes/Headmaster/Matron/Manly Lover/Boazer Carlton/Doctor: Jonathan Waite

Director: Richard Shannon
Designer: Keith Baker
Lighting: Richard Johnson
Musical Director: Andrew Dodge
Mask Consultant: John Wright

2002-06-02 08:45:31