It was new to me but A MONSTER CALLS is a much loved Children’s novel by Patrick Ness, a cherished film and now an extremely accomplished stage show, currently running at the Old Vic Theatre.Its central character is Conor, a teenage boy played by Matthew Tennyson who perfectly captures the awkwardness and misery of adolescence. Mind you Conor has a lot to be miserable about. His mum is dying of Cancer, he’s being bullied at school and his grandmother, whom he dislikes and his absentee dad, whom he mistrusts, are squabbling over his future.
Luckily a monster visits him every night, telling him three parables to help him understand his situation in exchange for Conor admitting his true feelings. If you think that sound twee so does our hero and he fights the process with hostility and sarcasm until the dream creature bullies and lures him into submission.
I was particularly impressed with how rounded the adult characters were. You feel their pain every bit as much as Conor’s especially in Selina Cadell performance as the grandmother. At first we share in his irritation at her but then there is a superb scene in which the two of have very different mental breakdowns.
Popular director Sally Cookson has quickly made a name for herself with her striking approach to storytelling that engages the audience’s imagination to the max for truly engaging theatre. She’s had two big hits at the National Theatre, JANE EYRE, in which a clever cast multi-tasked many roles each and created settings using physical theatre, mime and everyday objects, and her production of PETER PAN at the same address which had a junk yard aesthetic, including a skip as a pirate ship.
Don’t tell the director but her style is actually quite retro. In the 1990s pretty much every show had actors sat at the side of a bare stage in between scenes, who’d express everything from battle to ship wrecks by waving chairs over their heads in slow motion. This in itself was a development of techniques pioneered in the 1960’s and refined by company’s like Cheek By Jowl, Shared Experience and Theatre De Complicite. But I don’t think she was around then and lots of last night’s audience definitely weren’t so it felt pretty radical to them and maybe will to you.
Cookson is very good at stage pictures that move vertically as well as horizontally so, as well as waving chairs, the cast clamber up and down ropes. Indeed rope is one of the stars of the show, a ton of it is twisted to represent the monster, who is contained within a ancient, walking Ewe tree.
You would expect this subject, the suffering surrounding the death of a mother, to move the audience to tears and so it proves. But that’s the easy bit, anyone can put a dying mum on stage and get us crying. The skill here is how the story engages so intelligently with the process of grieving. I imagine it will be tremendously pertinent to anyone who’s lost a love one.
For everyone else it’s a daring and ingenious piece of stagecraft.
