Theatre / Reviews
Review: Malory Towers, Theatre Royal Bath – ‘Everything you’d expect from Emma Rice: full of strong performances, music and joyful set pieces’
Even perfectly beastly people deserve forgiveness. Girls are the absolute best at saying sorry and making friends, and as long as they are left to their own devices, they will become women the world can lean on.
Writing 70 years apart, Enid Blyton and Emma Rice both explore the behaviour and potential of (wise?) children, one within the rigid confines of social decency, the other with happy abandonment and risk. I wonder whether they would have been friends, if they had met. Rice says that the Malory Towers books are her ‘happy Lord of the Flies’ – which is fine, if you want to ask what makes people behave the way they do but you don’t really want to hear the answer.
Her version of Malory Towers is full of what we have come to expect from an Emma Rice show – live music, anachronistic references, joyful set pieces and rammed home messages of collective responsibility. If you’re already a fan, you’ll have a great evening.
A dormful of burgeoning schoolgirls meet on a train, full of anticipation of what boarding on the Cornish coast will be like. They are excited to share every minute and mood of their days together and as the term gets under way they deal swiftly with the resulting tantrums and home truths, mixed with a dash of peril and sad news from the outside world.
They go to lessons, swim, ride horses, argue, brush their hair, dance in their nighties and squabble, just like all girls do when they get together. They join forces to save each other from certain death. Their final message is one of strength and promise. What more can you ask for from a night out?
But It’s a meringue of a show. It’s impressive to look at, immediately enjoyable and deceptively shallow. Witty and gorgeous use of back projection is a delight, excellent work by Simon Baker here, and the puppetry, though brief, is great. Sheila Hancock’s involvement, voicing the Head Teacher we only see in shadow, feels like fan-girling on Rice’s part rather than a considered artistic choice.
The ensemble cast are good together, supportive and generous, their performances embodying the message of the show. Beautiful musical arrangements burst out of them at every turn. I must report that half tonight’s audience was on its feet at the first sign of a curtain call, and every song received a round of whooping applause. I genuinely worry about how to display real approval, or otherwise, these days, when ovations come so easily, so I can only control my own response. As the final dance number reached its climax I smiled broadly, but I didn’t whoop.
Malory Towers is at Theatre Royal Bath on May 1-9 at 7.30pm, with selected additional matinee performances. Tickets are available at www.theatreroyal.org.uk.
All photos: Steve Tanner
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