TOM'S MIDNIGHT GARDEN. To 25 January.
Manchester
TOM'S MIDNIGHT GARDEN
by Philippa Pearce adapted by David Wood Music Richard Taylor
Library Theatre To 25 January 2003
10,16,,21,24 January 10.30am
7-9,14-15,22-23 January 10.30am & 2pm
11 January 11am & 2.30pm
13,20 January 2pm
31 December, 1 January 2.30pm
28,30 December, 2-4,25 January 2.30pm & 7pm
Audio Described 25 January 2.30pm
BSL Signed 4 January 2.30pm
Theatre Singles 31 December
Runs 2hr 15min One interval
Review Timothy Ramsden 21 December
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www.uk.tickets.com
No laughs, but exhilarating imaginative inspiration in a production that's physically and emotionally moving.A 50th anniversary season that's already taken flight with two superb productions of American drama now stays miles high with David Wood's recent version of this very English story. Certainly, in Roger Haines' hands it never feels like a novel shoe-horned onto stage. It may be dark – literally, much of the time - ghostly and hardly 21st century street-cred. stuff, but the whole playing style zings exhilaratingly along and the final kick brings a deeper seasonal warmth than most eternally cheerful shows can manage. It's terrific.
Probably all the theatre devices Haines uses can be tracked to other shows. The main one – actors not in a specific scene forming an anonymous, apparently all-male long-coated chorus with walking-canes – recalls Rumanian director Silviu Purcarete's Phaedra, of all non-seasonal sources. At moments it turns performers into mobile scenic units – the canes becoming, for example, the bars on a bedroom window.
But more fundamentally it creates a sense of something ambiguous and half-perceived moving swiftly to create unexplained, yet somehow very real, experiences.
Which match Tom's experience – exiled from home during his brother's sickness, finding by night a way through a door into the no-longer existing garden of his aunt and uncle's home, as it was around 1900. What he experiences emerges gradually: first he's an unseen observer, then he builds a relationship with Hatty: they're young people only half-a-century apart in their realities.
Ben Elliot and Kirsten Parker bring a jointly youthful contrast: he a slow-emerging move from wonder to involvement in her life, crowded with the family solidity of late Victorian middle-class England, she a confident happiness in the new, private member of her circle. Both hit the right note to prepare for the final switch, when the time-stretch collapses into an unexpected modern-day reunion that's been waiting to happen; the culmination of an existence simultaneously less and more real than the daily world.
Driven too by Richard Taylor's music, Haines' flawlessly inventive production is scrupulously logical: the theatricality is never indulgent, always nudging attention to story and character. Whatever the true nature of Tom's midnight experiences, the show itself's a dream.
Tom: Ben Elliot
Aunt Gwen/Susan: Annie Fitzmaurice
Uncle Alan/Abel: Simon Markey
Hatty: Kirsten Parker
Mrs Bartholomew/Aunt Grace: Romy Baskerville
Herbert Melbourne/Barty: Alex McIntosh
James Melbourne/Tower Guide/Angel: Glyn Williams
Edgar Melbourne/Peter: Laurence Moran
Director: Roger Haines
Designer: Jamie Vartan
Lighting: Giuseppe di Iorio
Video/Projection: Nik Lever Catalyst Pictures Limited
Sound: Paul Gregory
Movement: Liam Steel
2002-12-28 10:46:46