THE RAILWAY CHILDREN. To 23 August.
York.
THE RAILWAY CHILDREN
by Mike Kenny adapted from the novel by E Nesbit.
National Railway Museum (Station Hall) Leeman Road YO26 4XJ To 23 August 2008.
11am & 2.30pm Wed. 6, 13, 20 Aug.
1.30pm 5, 7-10, 12, 14-16, 18-19, 21-23 Aug.
7pm Thu-Sat.
Audio-described 15 Aug 7pm, 16 Aug 1.30pm.
BSL Signed 21 Aug 7pm.
Captioned 9 Aug 1.30pm.
Runs 2hr 20min One interval.
TICKETS: 01904 623568.
www.yorktheatreroyal.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 3 August.
On-line drama in an apt setting.
It’s taken York Theatre Royal director Damian Cruden 11 years to achieve his ambition of staging Edith Nesbit’s 1906 novel in the city’s National Railway Museum. Compared with some track delays, that’s not bad, and, yes, the show did start on time. (Allow several minutes to walk through the Museum’s spaces to the area where the action happens – several hours if you’re likely to be seduced by the magnificent locomotives and rolling-stock on display).
It’s watched by an audience seated behind two platforms either side a central track, crossed by a bridge and with trolleys provided to link the sides in domestic scenes. A chorus of local young people provide compartment-filing capacity, and there are fine moments as they wave, disappearing into the distance as one of the trolleys serves for a carriage.
But the grand moments – the landslip where Roberta and Phyllis’s red underwear (red underwear?) serve as a warning to an oncoming train, and the climactic return - vividly employ real stock.
That’s one glory of the show; the other is Mike Kenny’s adaptation which plays events out amid the sense of a living, dynamic relationship between the three railway children: Roberta with her good sense, Peter’s enthusiasm for his own model engine and occasional misguided, if well-intentioned actions, and young Phyllis looking for her role in the family, uncertain of memories that are real to the older two.
Alongside, there’s the sense of their development. The three discuss, as from the future, when they became, or ceased to be, ‘the railway children’. It was a vivid year, but only an episode in lives that start to move different ways, as with Roberta’s sympathetic interest in the boy rescued from a tunnel (a scene suggested by black muslin stretched along the track).
Add their mother, bearing the secret of apparent disgrace and real poverty, at first with a brave smile, and always bravely but with increased weariness, the cook who points out the privilege the family’s former life depended on, and the people of rural Yorkshire, all well-played, and here is a first-class journey through a good-hearted story.
Roberta: Sarah Quintrell.
Peter: Jonathan Race.
Phyllis: Frances Marshall.
Mother: Andrina Carroll.
Father/Doctor/Railway Man: Robert Angell.
Old Gent/Railway Man: Colin Tarrant.
Mr Perks: Marshall Lancaster.
Between Maid/Mrs Perks: Elianne Byrne.
Cook/Mrs Viney: Jacqueline Naylor.
Butler/Schepansky/District Superintendent/Jim: Robin Simpson.
Director: Damian Cruden.
Designer: Joanna Scotcher.
Lighting: Richard G Jones.
Sound: Craig Vear.
Composer/Musical Director: Christopher Madin.
Voice coach: Susan Stern.
Assistant designer: Lydia Denna.
2008-08-04 15:18:29