✭✭✭✩✩

by Mike Kenny, directed by Damian Cruden

Mirvish Productions/National Railway Museum/York Theatre Royal, Roundhouse Theatre, Toronto

May 8-August 14, 2011

Despite the emphasis in the advertising, don’t go the The Railway Children because the action features a real steam engine.  You can appreciate the look and size of the engine better where it stands outside, and it does make only two appearances inside anyway.  Instead, go to The Railway Children to see gentle story told with supremely imaginative theatricality.

The play is an adaptation by Mike Kenny of the classic 1906 children’s book by Edith Nesbit (1858-1924).  The story tells the experiences of the three Waterbury children--Roberta (“Bobbie’), Peter and Phyllis--who try to sort out what is happening in the adult world around them.  On Peter’s birthday, their father is taken away for reasons that remain unknown till near the play’s end.  They have to divest themselves of their servants and move to a small house in Yorkshire, where their mother earns some money by writing stories.  Their main pleasure is going down to the railway station and waving at the trains going down to London in the hope that by so doing they somehow are sending their love to their father.  They make friends with Albert Perks, the station porter, and his large family and take in the exiled Russian writer Mr. Schepansky, who is searching for his wife and daughter. 

The story is episodic rather than tightly dramatic.  Except for their presence in Nesbit’s novel, whole sections of the story could be omitted--like the Schepansky episode or the fuss about Mr. Perks’ birthday--because they do nothing to further the plot.  Kenny’s adaptation depends on shifting quickly from one episode to the next to hold our attention since the only real throughline--”When will father come home?”--can only be solved by the adults and the passage of time, not by the children.  The main virtue of Kenny’s adaptation is dividing the narration among the three Waterbury children so that they compete in telling the parts of the story that they subsequently act out.

If story itself is not exactly gripping, director Damian Cruden’s staging is fascinating, primarily because of the unusual stage the production requires.  The new Roundhouse Theatre is a tent build over one of the tracks near the old John Street Roundhouse at the base of the CN Tower.  Outside the building you can see “Vicky”, a beautiful 85-tonne British steam engine built in 1893, on the turntable aimed at the theatre and ready to make her entrance.  The auditorium is long and narrow with two banks of 500 raised seats facing each other.  The playing area consists of two long two-metre-wide, 30-metre-long platforms on either side of the central track.  Initially, you wonder how doing a play here will work since it seems that only the pedestrian overpass at the far end of the auditorium connects the two platforms. 

The solution to this problem is ingenious.  Set designer Joanna Scotcher has created as series of at least four wheeled platforms, tops level with the side platforms and as wide as the gap, that can be hand-pushed to numerous positions within the gap.  The intricate blocking of actors crossing from side to side across these wheeled platforms that sometimes come together or separate is a pleasure in itself.  Usually, two platforms together serve as one of the numerous rooms used in the story.  Sometimes, however, one can serve, aided with Craig Vear’s realistic sound and Richard G. Jones’s superbly effective lighting, as a coach on a train.  In fact, the arrivals of a peopled moving platform rolling down the track is so effective, that they nearly obviate the need for a real train.  In fact, the real train when it is shunted in impresses mostly for its beauty and bulk than anything else.

What lets the show down most is the unevenness of the acting.  Fortunately, since the show depends so heavily on our interest in the Waterbury children, the three actors who play those parts are excellent.  Natasha Greenblatt lends Bobbie a natural warmth and enthusiasm that engages us and, more than any other factor, makes us care what happens to her and her siblings.  Harry Judge and Kate Besworth provide a fine comic balance to Bobbie’s seriousness.  The interplay among the three is so well done, they seem like real siblings filled with energy and curiosity. 

The greatest flaw is Craig Warnock’s performance as Mr. Perks, who functions basically as the children’s surrogate father in Yorkshire.  Given his major role, he seems to have virtually no stage presence.  Any one of the children projected more personality than he did which made it difficult to believe in dramatic terms that they could be cowed by him. 

As the children’s Mother, Emma Campbell has the difficult role of being the ideal Edwardian parent, constantly having to put a good face on sorrow and trying circumstances.  One merely wished for a bit more variety in this perpetually pained nobility.  Richard Sheridan Willis makes much more an impression as the local Yorkshire Doctor than as the children’s father, while Doug MacLeod, who has to act mostly in Russian and French, plays a vivid part as Schepansky. 

Among the smaller roles, Marilla Wex is delightful in her two roles as the Waterbury’s Cook in London and as Mrs. Viney in Yorkshire.  John Gilbert is exemplary as the Old Gentleman, who plays a key role in solving the children’s problems.   And Kelly Penner brings a breath of fresh air to the story as the boy Jim just as our interest in starting to wane.  With all three, we wish the story allowed them more to do since they are more fun in the first two instances, and more intriguing in the third, than the main adult characters.

I had the benefit of learning the views of a bright seven-year-old boy sitting by me.  He was completely engaged by the story from beginning to end even though he didn’t understand all the details of what was happening.  Some parts he found too frightening, as when Bobbie and the injured Jim are left alone in the dark railway tunnel.  Then he had to hide his head.  Otherwise, he remained wide-eyed throughout. 

The Railway Children won the 2011 Olivier Award for Best Entertainment and it is probably best to think of the show as an “entertainment” rather than a “play” since the ingenuity of its staging is ultimately more important than its drama.  With a stronger cast to play the key adult roles, the drama in the Toronto production would hold an equal weight with the spectacle and provide a more satisfying experience, at least for the adults in the audience.  For children, the abundant stage activity, the genial performances of the actors playing the children and, of course, the appearance of Vicky the steam engine will be excitement enough.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Natasha Greenblatt (Roberta), Harry Judge (Peter) and Kate Besworth (Phyllis).

©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.