The Secret Garden assessment: A blooming good backyard makeoever
The Secret Garden (Open Air Theatre, London)
Verdict: Fresh enchantment
Kyoto (Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon)
Verdict: Greenhouse gassing
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved children’s story is subject to an audacious but charming cross-pollination project at Regent’s Park. And where the glorious backdrop of the park itself sets the bar very high, director Anna Himali Howard’s multicultural makeover doesn’t disappoint.
The story of spoilt Mary, orphaned in India and shipped out to the fictional Edwardian home of Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire, remains pretty much intact.
Now, though, Mary is mixed-race (having an Indian mother), and the secret garden she discovers in her new home is laid out along South Asian lines by her (late) Indian aunt.
But Mary’s pet project, of helping her sickly cousin Colin to walk, is here corrected to helping him accept his disability by embracing ‘the magic of life’.
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved children’s story The Secret Garden is subject to an audacious but charming cross-pollination project at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, writes PATRICK MARMION
Most amusingly, this spectacle is grafted onto lessons in Yorkshire dialect, with reassuringly robust acting
The story is largely intact, with some updates, such as Mary’s pet project, to help Colin to walk, here corrected to helping him accept his disability by embracing ‘the magic of life’
Leslie Travers’ delightfully inventive staging sets the tone as the walled garden’s flora is represented with brightly coloured streamers tugged up poles from the soil of raised beds, while concertina paper garlands are stretched out for flowers.
Most amusingly, this spectacle is grafted onto lessons in Yorkshire dialect, as Mary is floored by idioms including the Yorkshire ‘mooers’ (heather covered uplands, not cows).
The acting is reassuringly robust, too, with young adult actor Hannah Khalique-Brown making a ferocious ten-year-old Mary who really is quite contrary.
Delighted by the discovery of ‘skipping rerps’ (ropes), she retains much of her defiant spirit as she becomes more independent.
Theo Angel as Colin is also pleasingly superior, but the people’s favourite is Richard Clews as the ancient gardener who is a teetering treasure trove of horticultural legend.
The Disneyfied learning-to-love-yourself ending may require a shot of Pepto-Bismol for some (me).
But before that, smoky Indian flute, twang of sitar and rumble of tabla drums, alongside cleverly improvised incarnations of crows, robins and squirrels, bring fresh enchantment to a classic tale.
After nearly three hours of greenhouse gassing in the RSC’s history of the 1997 climate change conference, I still wasn’t sure what Kyoto was trying to say.
Is it seeking to reprimand world leaders for failing to agree effective action? To celebrate 160 countries having once agreed on something, despite oil-lobby attempts to stop them?
Leslie Travers’ delightfully inventive staging sets the tone as the walled garden’s flora is represented with brightly coloured streamers tugged up poles from the soil of raised beds, with concertina garland papers for flowers
Smoky Indian flute, twang of sitar and rumble of tabla drums, alongside cleverly improvised incarnations of crows, robins and squirrels, bring fresh enchantment to a classic tale
Whatever the answer it’s a hugely ambitious work, staged by Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Crown) with Justin Martin (Prima Facie); and written by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson (the pair behind West End migrant drama The Jungle).
The result is a bewildering immersion in diplomatic double-think, climaxing in the armies of delegates quibbling over commas, colons and parentheses in pursuit of impenetrable treaties.
Bizarrely, their story is narrated and driven by the mischievous American lawyer Don Pearlman, who sought to scupper any agreement on emissions on behalf of the oil industry.
Yet in Stephen Kunken (the office twit in TV show Billions), Daldry has cast a vaguely likeable climate fiend. He even eclipses Jorge Bosch as Raul Estrada-Oyuela, the Argentinian chairman who was the real hero, driving through the agreement after 48 hours of deadlock.
Yet it’s John Prescott (Ferdy Roberts) who steals the show, bragging about his experience in multi-lateral negotiation as a ship’s steward in the merchant navy.
