| The Railway Children by Arts Centre Community group |
| First presented in 2018 by Aberystwyth Arts Centre |
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cast size:?
synopsis: Ending the Theatre Year in the Best Possible Way |
There is 1 review of Aberystwyth Arts Centre's The Railway Children in our database:
| An episodic script and inadequate overacting... | |
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The Railway Children
by Arts Centre Community group
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[print] |
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venue Chepstow and touring |
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July 17, 2006 |
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| As summer arrives, so with a fearsome inevitability do the al fresco theatre companies, designed to provide background to your picnic in some picturesque but usually irrelevant historic ruin. This year there’s a plethora of such entertainment – wherever there’s a castle, there’ll be a group of enthusiastic performers for some of whom it is quite probably their only steady professional job and whose limitations will be ruthlessly exposed by the threat of rain, howling winds, bored kids, uncomfortable adults, loud birds, motorway traffic, popping champagne corks and Shakespeare’s scripts. Heartbreak Productions have been at this game for some fifteen years now and, to be honest, can usually be relied upon to deliver something at least inoffensively engaging and even interestingly different from the predictable pop classics and this year you will find them in various venues in South Wales with four different productions. I hope the other three are better than this one which launched the theatre programme of the ambitious Chepstow Festival, having earlier played at Caldicot Castle as the first touring venue of the company’s three-month tour. The Railway Children may be just about regarded as a classic, though I suspect many know it from the film rather than Edith Nesbitt’s novel, but at the heart of the failure of this production is actor Phil Hemming’s adaptation – a series of scenes with no real sense of narrative and a large group of one-dimensional characters (of whom seven of the twenty-one Mr Hemming himself plays, and with more ability than some of the other cast members, it must be said). There are a couple of tweaks employed to make this rather boring and dated story more attractive. The first is to frame the story within the pretence that we, the audience, are waiting at a railway station called Butterbeck Halt for a train that is so late (plus ca change…) that the staff have to distract us with their tale of the Railway Children – a device that frankly confuses younger members of the audience and seems unnecessary to the rest of us. The second is to play up the gender-role themes of the story: not only was Edith Nesbitt a founder-member of the Fabian Society, and therefore mixed with the likes of Havelock Ellis, Eleanor Marx, the Webbs and George Bernard Shaw, but she was also something of a radical herself despite a fairly privileged upbringing – she was seven months pregnant when she married and lived in a ménage a trois with another woman. Phil Hemming and director Maddy Kerr have obviously decided such credentials could give some sexual politics to the tale, especially with the presumption that Bobby, the oldest child, is an autobiographical portrait of the author herself, and so the only boy, Peter, is portrayed as a stereotypical Edwardian boyish boy, into toy trains, warfare and other youngmanly pursuits in a quite prattish manner. Bobby, a contraction of Roberta (just as the utterly annoying young sister’s name Phil is a contraction of Phyllis), is of course sensible and we are reminded again and again of the Fabian flavoured protofeminism that, it must be said, is more convincing in its Shavian form. But the sexual politics aren’t sharp enough to save the show from being tedious, its episodic script and inadequate overacting never compensated for by any interesting perspective on what should be more than a simple story of a girl growing up in an era of change. The birds of Chepstow Castle always make their presence felt for these open-air productions – swifts swooping, seagulls squawking, pigeons cooing, but I swear I spotted a line of vultures silhouetted up on the parapet, ready to swoop and pick the bones of an audience about to die of boredom. But it could have been worse. At least it didn’t rain. # The Railway Children (which might improve !) is at Abergavenny Castle on Aug 1, Goodrich Castle on Aug 2/3 and Cardiff Castle on Aug 9. |
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| reviewer: David Adams |
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