Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
✭✭✭✭✩
by Paul Ledoux, directed by Allen MacInnis
Young People’s Theatre, Toronto
February 8-March 17, 2018
Dickon: “It's the best fun I ever had in my life—shut in here an’ wakenin’ up a garden.”
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel The Secret Garden has been adapted many times for the stage, sometimes as a play, a musical or an opera. Young People’s Theatre is currently staging an adaptation of the novel as a play by Paul Ledoux, who first adapted it for YPT in 1991 and has now revised it for this production. Over time The Secret Garden has become one of the most beloved of early 20th-century children’s novels. The current YPT production is beautifully designed and directed and should inspire children and their parents to believe that it is possible to improve the world by recognizing its self-made ills.
For those unfamiliar with the novel the story focusses on 10-year-old Mary Lennox (Natalia Gracious), a girl born in India to British parents. When a cholera epidemic kills her parents and servants, she is sent to her closest living relative, her uncle Archibald Craven (Simon Bracken), whom she has never met and who lives in a huge, gloomy, mostly empty manor in Yorkshire. At first, Mary is rude, selfish and unhappy with everything about her new life. Fortunately, her maid Martha (Vivien Endicott-Douglas), though vexed, counters Mary’s ill manner with kindness.
When Mary asks why she never sees her uncle, Martha tells her that is he has been very unwell ever since his wife died in a walled garden that Mr. Craven has had locked up an abandoned. This makes Mary curious about the garden and she begins to become friendly with the manor’s gardener Ben Weatherstaff (Dan Lett). With the help of a friendly robin, Mary finds the key to the locked garden and its door. With the help of Dickon (Benjamin Sutherland), Martha’s 12-year-old brother, Mary hopes to restore the nearly dead garden to its former glory.
Meanwhile, Mary is still plagued by the strange cries she hears at night. Plucking up her courage she traces the cries to a secluded bedroom and discovers that the cries have been emanating from Colin (Jake Runeckles), Mr. Craven’s son, who is so sickly that the doctor (also Simon Bracken) thinks he is dying. It doesn’t help that Colin has been deliberated hidden away in the manor by his father. The question is whether Mary can somehow restore Colin back to health just as she and Dickon hope to restore the secret garden.
The Secret Garden may be a children’s novel but it is also clearly about the process of recovery from psychological trauma, grief and disease. The garden is an obvious metaphor for the natural healing process that human will can foolishly try to prevent. All the tenants of the manor – Mary, Mr. Craven and Colin – suffer from ills they have imposed on themselves or that other people have imposed on them. Those who are in touch with nature – Martha, Weatherstaff and Dickon – are filled with both optimism and health. Mary’s arrival begins a chain reaction whereby she is cured of her ill-temper by contact with all those associated with the garden, and her conversion has the power to help cure others.
For this production director Allen MacInnis has taken the statement that Mary was born and raised in India as an opportunity to cast an Indian-Canadian actor as Mary. Since Colin is her cousin, their mother’s being sisters, MacInnis has cast another Indian-Canadian actor in this role. The advantage is that the familiar story can be told with a more diverse cast, particularly since the audiences at YPT are the most ethnically diverse in the city.
It was daring of Burnett and is daring of Ledoux to introduce the heroine of the story in a such a negative light. Natalia Gracious plays the spoiled, ill-manner brat so convincingly that we wonder if we will ever get used to her as the central character. It might help if Ledoux reminded us that Mary, shunted away to a foreign country and unknown relatives has suffered the psychologically complex fate of losing parents that apparently never loved her.
Gracious focusses on Mary’s tantrums and impudence even when she first meets Weatherstaff, but Gracious shows how almost against her will she is pulled out of her egocentrism into an interest, gardening and the secret garden, that finally allow her to focus on something outside herself. The magical robin redbreast, symbolic guardian of the garden, is key in helping draw Mary out of her self. Gracious carefully and gradually shows us this transition in Mary. Gracious uses a harsh tone as the insolent Mary and ends the play with a more rounded, modulated tone, although this change of tone seems to lag behind the change in mentality that Gracious depicts.
Most people know that making thoroughly good characters is difficult, yet three members of the cast succeed in doing so in different ways. Prime among them is Vivien Endicott-Douglas as Martha. Martha is the servant who has to interact most with Mary when the young girl is at her most unpleasant. Endicott-Douglas arrives in Mary’s room as a ray of sunshine in the gloomy house and Endicott-Douglas subtly shows us how surprised, annoyed and troubled by Mary’s behaviour Martha is and how Martha struggles to return good for bad in their relationship. When we see Martha later, Endicott-Douglas shows us that Martha is not the type of person to bear a grudge and by giving Mary a present after all the harsh words Mary have given Martha, we see that Martha’s attempts to see the good in the psychologically damaged Mary has a positive outcome.
As the old gardener Weatherstaff, Dan Lett’s kindly, knowledgable character simply ignores Mary’s insolence and deflects her energy successfully into other interests. Weatherstaff’s friendliness with a robin comes as a revelation to Mary. As Dickon, Benjamin Sutherland shows he is Martha’s brother by the power of his sunny, nature-loving attitude that positively radiates throughout the auditorium. The stage seems to glow brighter when Sutherland appears and it is no wonder that Mary should be caught up in his boundless energy.
As for the other inmates of the manor, it must be admitted Lord Craven would be more effective if played by an older actor than Simon Bracken. Bracken does fine work but can’t really give the role the weight that more years would, as with Dan Lett’s Weatherstaff, naturally provide. Bracken does distinguish clearly between his role as Lord Craven and as Colin’s doctor Dr. Craven, whom he plays as younger and more upright in posture and quicker in speech.
Sarah Mennell as the housekeeper Medlock keeps her character harsh and suspicious until the very end of he play when we finally see that she, too, has another softer side. Jake Runeckles plays Colin as very much a male counterpart to Mary, who hasn’t had the benefit of the warming and softening influences that Mary has had. A major turning point in the play is when Colin agrees to allow Mary to sing him to sleep. It shows that not only has Colin found in Mary at least a human being he can trust, but that Mary has so far let go of her egocentricity that she is willing to help another person.
Allen MacInnis has directed the play with a keen insight into the changing stages in the mental state of Mary, Colin and eventually Lord Craven. The physical production itself is gorgeous. Designer Teresa Przybylski has created a wall that runs the entire width of the stage. It is covered with the tangled meanderings of what looks like dead vines. When the top third of the wall is flown upwards, the wall becomes the wall that surrounds the secret garden. The wall has a magical quality in that it looks solid but is, in fact, made up almost entirely of hidden door – an apt visual metaphor for access to hidden truths both inside and outside the manor. Lighting designer Lesley Wilkinson is excellent at creating the gloomy atmosphere of the indoors, enhanced by Debashis Sinha’s eerie soundtrack of moaning and whistling winds, in contrast to the bright, peaceful world of the outdoors.
David Ledoux’s 80-minute-long condensation of the novel deftly preserves the novel’s overarching symbolism of death and rebirth and skilfully links the physical and mental improvement of Mary, Colin and Lord Craven to each other and to the novel’s deeper meaning without ever over-emphasizing it. Ledoux wisely treats his audience as intelligent and as the Q&A after the show demonstrated, the children not only received the play enthusiastically but clearly understood what the play was about. The Secret Garden would thus be a fine choice for family entertainment and the discussions it could lead to about the healing power of nature and the healing power of people who strive to see the best in each other.
For ages 6+.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Natalia Gracious as Mary and Jake Runeckles as Colin; Natalia Gracious as Mary and Vivien Endicott-Douglas as Martha; Natalia Gracious Mary and Dan Lett as Ben Weatherstaff. ©2018 Cylla von Tiedemann.
For tickets, visit www.youngpeoplestheatre.ca.
2018-02-14
The Secret Garden