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by Michael O’Brien, directed by Tim Carroll

Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

May 27-October 13, 2018

“Make your choice, adventurous Stranger;

Strike the bell and bide the danger”

When Tim Carroll directed a stage adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for the Stratford Festival in 2016 it was a huge hit, was extended and sold out every performance.  Little wonder then that Carroll would wish to mount another stage adaptation of one of C.S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” now that he is Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival.  The problem is that The Magician’s Nephew is widely regarded as the weakest of the seven Narnia books.  It’s a largely unnecessary prequel published in 1955 to the first Narnia book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), after Lewis had already published that book and four sequels.  Though the current production features fine performances from the entire cast, the conception of its design is fatally flawed and the show in general will likely appeal most to those who already know The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the other Narnia tales.

The Magician’s Nephew is set in 1900 and concerns two children Digory (Travis Seetoo) and his friend Polly (Vanessa Sears).  Digory is unhappy because his mother is dying and the doctors say there is no cure for her.  His father is in the military and is stationed far away.  To cheer him up Polly shows him her “cave” which is really the open attic that sits on top all of the adjacent row houses including the two Digory and Polly live in.  Dropping into an abandoned house they open a door only to discover Digory’s hated Uncle Andrew (Steven Sutcliffe) there in his secret study.

Andrew has been dabbling in magic and has created two sets of two rings – a yellow ring that takes the wearer to another world, and a green ring that brings the wearer back.  So far he has only experimented on guinea pigs being too cowardly to try it himself, but now with two children before him he feels he has the perfect test subjects and tricks Polly into putting on the yellow ring and disappearing, thus compelling Digory to go after her to bring her back

Where the children arrive is a strange place known as  the Wood between the Worlds, because it is dotted with various pools that serve as portals to other places.  Digory, keen to see if there is a cure for his mother in another world, jumps in one of the pools with Polly and they wind up in the ancient city of Charn.  Contrary to a written warning, Digory rings a bell that awakes the only living inhabitant of Charn, Jadis (Deborah Hay), a powerful witch who has with one word destroyed her entire country.  Grasping onto the children she is transported with them when they return to London.  Luckily, her deadly magic has no power on Earth, but she still has superhuman strength and Uncle Andrew is quite smitten with her.

To fetch her away from Earth the children grab onto her – and, unknowingly, onto Andrew, the cabbie Frank (Michael Therriault) and his horse Strawberry (Matt Nethersole) – and they all are transported to the land of Narnia which is just in the process of being created through the song of the great lion Aslan (Kyle Blair).  Will they all have to remain in this strange new world forever?  Will they somehow drive the evil Jadis out of Narnia?  Or will Polly and Digory at least manage to get back home, preferably with a medicine to cure Digory’s mother?

What makes The Magician’s Nephew quite a different book from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is that the former is entirely constructed to explain the peculiar features of the latter.  The delight in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is that it thrusts us into a world whose rules and anomalies we have to learn as we go along.  The problem with The Magician’s Nephew is that Lewis unfortunately felt that he had to provide answers to questions about the world of Narnia even though, since it is a magic world, no explanations are really necessary.  Do we really need to know how a London lamppost came to be in Narnia?  Do we really need to know who the White Witch used to be and the extraordinarily involved way she came to Narnia?  Do we actually need to know how Narnia itself came into being?  To that last question, given the Christian allegory that lies behind the Narnia stories, the answer might be in the affirmative though some may feel that God the Father should be depicted as the Creator, not Aslan, who stands in as God the Son.  

As if the plot and goals of The Magician’s Nephew were not complicated enough, Michael O’Brien’s stage adaptation needlessly gives the play a frame.  Thus we first meet a chorus of so-called Dream Detectives (not in the book) whose plan is to re-create on stage the communal dream that we all (meaning the audience) supposedly are experiencing.  This is rather a topsy-turvy way of describing what is happening since the “communal dream” the audience will have is the play that the actors will perform, not something already in the audience’s minds, unless the Detectives are assuming, incorrectly, that everyone has already read the Narnia books.  

Thus, for the first act of the play the “Detectives” function as stagehands who move props about on stage to represent different locations, though they do not actually play any of the lead roles in the dream they are supposedly re-creating.  More confusingly, by the end of the play O’Brien has forgotten about the Dream Detectives entirely.  Instead, he portrays the play we have just seen as a story told by two contemporary children (Seetoo and Sears) to their mother (Patty Jamieson).  One feels like telling O’Brien, “Choose one frame or the other but not both”.      

O’Brien’s confusing frame is echoed by the confusing design that Tim Carroll has employed.  When we first enter the Festival Theatre we see that the stage is strewn with large, cube-shaped cardboard boxes.  The conceit Carroll would like to carry throughout the play is that everything in all the worlds of the action can be created out of these boxes or made from cutting out shapes from corrugated cardboard.  The idea is that of children imagining magical events when all they have are  the cardboard boxes in an attic at hand. 

This idea is carried through most of Act 1 with doors, windows, walls, pools all represented by different configurations of the boxes.  Even Uncle Andrew’s desk and wing chair, trees and the horse-head mask for Strawberry are made from corrugated cardboard.  In Act 2, this concept falls apart.  Strawberry’s new magnificent wings have nothing to do with cardboard.  And the masks of the Narnians, including Aslan’s mane, are of a white washi-like paper not the brown cardboard of the boxes.  Except for Strawberry’s mask, Jennifer Goodman’s costumes have had no hint of the “everything-is-cardboard” concept.

What undermines this entire conceit is Carroll’s extensive use of Cameron Davis’s projections that appear on a semicircle of ten electronically controlled roller blinds on stage, two sets of three roller blinds on either side of the proscenium and a circle of six in front of the semicircle.  The performers on stage can move the boxes about as much as they want, but it is really Davis’s often cinematic projections that really characterize each location and show when we have shifted from one location to the next.  What is irking is the pretence that the show is about do-it-yourself children’s play when, in fact, it is all about high-tech stagecraft.

The best part of the show as usual at the Shaw is the acting of the ensemble.  As Digory and Polly, Travis Seetoo and Vanessa Sears make a realistic pair of sympathetic children who grow from innocent adventurers to young people able confront serious ethical questions.  Steven Sutcliffe is an excellent Uncle Andrew.  He is gruff and menacing at first but the main comedy of the play is that the bully he seems to be is revealed to be a mewling coward afraid of everything in Narnia.  Deborah Hay is wonderful as Jadis, who smiles smugly when she speaks of murdering her sister or the entire populace of Charn.  Hay is an actor with such control that she able to pull off Jadis’s comic adventures in London without lessening the supremely sinister aspect of her character.  (By the way, if wardrobe can’t get Jadis’s headdress to stay put in Act 2, they should omit it.) 

In other roles, Kyle Blair is a noble, clear-voiced Aslan, grieved that there is evil in his new land, kind to the children and unfazed by minor quarrels brought to his attention.  Michael Therriault is cheery and down-to-earth as Frank the Cabman, and Matt Nethersole is a delight as his horse Strawberry, who relishes the chance at last to say what he thinks once he gains the power of speech in Narnia.     

Like the book, the stage adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew is organized around three major revelations – the origin of the London lamppost in Narnia, the origin of the White Witch and the origin of the magic wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.  O’Brien and Carroll make the big climax of the play the origin of the wardrobe and its use by the four Pevensie children.  This is all very well for those who have already read that book, but for anyone coming to the show afresh, the “revelation” of the wardrobe like those of the lamppost and the witch, will mean absolutely nothing.

As a result The Magician’s Nephew may momentarily dazzle with all of Cameron Davis’s projections and the figures of a witch and talking animals.  But ultimately the show is unsatisfying.  If the point of Digory’s journey was to find a cure for his mother, why does the adaptation never show us what finally happened?  And, as already mentioned, the story is not self-contained and emphasizes plot points only of interest to those who know the other Narnia books.  One can’t help wondering if Tim Carroll has staged The Magician’s Nephew only as an excuse for reviving his The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at the Shaw Festival in the near future.    

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Travis Seetoo as Digory, Vanessa Sears as Polly and Matt Nethersole as Strawberry; Steven Sutcliffe as Uncle Andrew with Deborah Hay as Jadis; Kyle Blair as Aslan with the ensemble. ©2018 Emily Cooper.   

For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.