This show was my first visit to the venue under the new artistic directorship of Emma Rice. The atmosphere has certainly livened up a bit with a covers band playing blatantly amplified music and the use of stage lighting. Under previous regimes this move away from traditional Elizabethan theatre practices would have been unthinkable, the venue used to be lit with a flood lights giving the same general wash over stage and spectators throughout.It always seemed silly pretending modern technology didn’t exist and now you get the benefit of the 16th century open stage with room for several hundred people to stand and watch in the courtyard around it, plus everything is lit and amplified where necessary to make maximum dramatic input.
As you’ll see from the title, this isn’t a Shakespeare production, the Globe Theatre’s core repertoire; it’s an import of a production Rice first staged for her own Cornish based company Kneehigh of yet another stage dramatisation of a children’s book by Michael Morpurgo.
The smash hit WAR HORSE, by the same author, was a long fixture in the West End and introduced audiences to the First World War through the story of a boy’s relationship with a horse. Earlier this summer the open air theatre in Regents Park staged RUNNING WILD, Morpurgo’s introduction to environmental issues explored via a boy’s relationship with and elephant. This new production concerns events during the Second World War and a girl’s relationship with her cat.
The story opens in the modern day when a young man is invited to read his grandmother Lily’s war time diary as she takes a plane on a mystery mission. In those pages he reads of her life as a twelve year old in, Slapton, a small village in Devon. Her daily routines in the village are dramatised for us; her dad has left for war and evacuees are sent to stay to escape the German bombing of London. The whole community is then ordered to leave so that the allied forces can rehearse the Normandy landings on the beach but Tips the cat runs away and on Lily’s visits to her former home to find her she befriends the American soldiers billeted to the village. The military operation is successful but bungling leads to the unnecessary death of one of her new friends. In the present day Grandma returns with fresh revelations about the fate of those in the flash back.
With children’s perspectives to the fore things are apparently simplistic but it all adds up to a magnificent and hugely entertaining parable about love, loss, family, acceptance and community.
The sweeping story is played out at a lively pace using every crowd pleasing trick of theatrical vocabulary. There's puppets, cross dressing, modern music, 1940’s music, switches in scale and perspective, broad comedy characters, nuanced central characters, infectiously fun dancing and sing a-long-songs from then and now, all served up amidst moments of hilarity and pathos that will chime with audiences of every age, offering a chance for anyone to learn about life in a largely forgotten corner of modern history.
The whole cast perform with wit, verve and sensitivity and the joy they take in making theatre spills off the stage and envelops the audience. Particular praise should go to adult actor Katy Owen who makes 12 year old Lily entirely believable in all her loveable spikiness and Mike Shepherd as Grandma who worked through the audiences desire to laugh at a man in a dress until we were hanging on his every word entirely believing in him as a feisty female pensioner. These two really captured the audience’s heart and hooked us with their stories throughout.
An audience pleasing night of great invention and pleasure, I can’t imagine who wouldn't love it.
Russian dancers fleeing the revolution first introduced the western art form of ballet to the city of Shanghai in the 1920s, with Madame Mao personally promoting the formation of China's national dance school in the 1950s. Xin Lili, herself one of the company's former leading dancers has been director for the past 15 years and advocates interpretation and inclusion of both western-inspired classics and more traditional, Chinese-stylised subjects.