AN ANGLO-INDIAN EDWARDIAN YORKSHIRE…
Good to be back for another year, up on the high tiers in the last golden hour, waiting to watch the great trees darken against the sky. Fitting, too, for a heatwave production to celebrate a far smaller and more secret garden, in Francis Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 children’s classic. Mary Lennox, cross-natured and pampered child of Imperial India. is orphaned in a cholera epidemic and sent to the gloom of Misselthwaite Manor. Yorkshire moors and their people – notably the maid’s brother Dickon, friend of all wild creatures – begin to change her and she finds her long-dead aunt’s locked and abandoned walled garden. Discovering her crippled, angry cousin Colin she deploys her gift for unsympathetically robust comradeship, and teaches him in turn the power of life and growth. Hodgson Burnett has thus charmed generations, even more than with her Fauntleroy or Little Princess (it helps that Mary Lennox is less virtuous than either).
But, inevitably, fiction of this period will not be left to speak unfiltered (the film of A Little Princess suffers mawkish brutality when the father turns out to be not dead, or even ruined: my children were outraged), In this case, the book reworked by Holly Robinson and Anna Himali Howard suffers no such atrocity but is firmly recast for the sort of modern sensibilities which need warning of “ableist and colonial language” as well as death. Mary’s late mother is now Indian, but her father a colonial official, with disparaging mention of Curzon and the partition of India in early scenes. Her missing aunt Padma appears late on, after being involved in a resistance movement. As for disability, the novel’s original payoff which sees Colin rise and walks towards his father father is firmly replaced by an affirmation that being fully able doesn’t matter: he stays sitting, and is still loved and precious. Meanwhile the family doctor has a disabling stammer and Dickon walks with a stick: to be honest you do sometimes feel you are being beaten about the head by the subject.
I tell you all this for the record, because it says much about the way theatremakers now work , and feel they have to work, in a more caring Britain. But the adjustment it rarely stands in the way of the story’s essential charm, and Hannah Khalique-Brown is a wonderful Mary: skinnily stroppy, a right little Memsahib when she arrives and believes the Yorkshire maid Martha can be treated like a subservient Ayah. The latter is Molly Hewitt-Richards, a real treat, especially when she skips. And the heroine’s slow spiritual thawing on the moor, and the hidden garden, are neatly handled: her stroppy scolding of Colin is magnificent. Theo Angel is a fine Colin too , sickly and lordly and convincing in his discovery of life and the green growth of spring – the Yorkshire word “wick” for that liveliness if nicely used. In fact all the moments of the original author’s prose shine out, often spoken in chorus or antiphon by the ensemble: I could have done with a bit less of them all bustling forward at key moments because it spoils the sense of the three children’s autonomous progress, but on the other hand there is some charming puppetry . Shan Phull is a nimble and tuneful robin, a fur tippet becomes a squirrel, a sweater a fox, and Mrs Medlock’s shawl is beautifully handled as a crow by Amanda Hadingue.
If there is one proper disappointment it is in the adaptation’s direction of Dickon: of the three children he is given less to do, less personality of his own. In the book, for instance, he strikingly introduces Mary and Colin to the “doxology” – a Christian Sunday hymn of praise – as part of the garden’s growing marvel, and there’s an honest Yorkshire innocence in contrast to posh sick Colin and posh angry Mary. Here, he has no such identity but is just the creatures’ friend , and his magic is not religious but part of Mary’s half-remembered Indian/Bengali magic chanting dance, which Aunt Padma eventually teaches them to do more authentically. So you lose some of the Yorkshire quality in Dickon being so bland. Never mind. Yorkshire grit gets its turn as Martha the maid is a joy, and so is Richard Clews as Ben Weatherstaff , who stumps round with a spade and takes no sentimental nonsense. A good-hearted family show. .
opeanairtheatre.com to 20 July
rating four
theatreCat 