MUSICAL THEATRE REVIEW: THE SECRET GARDEN
13 FEB/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

In a world where childhood is increasingly considered a time of inviolate innocence, children’s stories from an era when children were considered adults-in-training don’t always make for the best of theatre While the stories of Dickens and his ilk — even our own Lucy Maude Montgomery— offer plenty in the way of life lessons, they are often couched in an unvarnished world of cruelty, heartbreak, sorrow and mean-spiritedness — all things from which we try to shield modern children.

Of course, a little bit of anthropomorphism, à la THE LION KING, can help. And if that doesn’t work, or if the story doesn’t lend itself to lions and meerkats and the like, a heavy dollop of sentimentality — think OLIVER or ANNE OF GREEN GABLES — is almost certain to do the trick; the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down.

That seems to be the theory behind the new staging of THE SECRET GARDEN that opened at the Royal Alexandra Theatre on Sunday, a presentation by David Mirvish of the John Stalker for Festival City Theatres Trust, Festival Theatre Edinburgh Production. Based on the 1911 novel of the same name by Frances Hodgson Burnett, it’s the story of young Mary Lennox (played by Ellie Coldicutt), left alone and orphaned in India at the top of the story, when her parents and everyone else in her life succumbs to cholera.

The young orphan is shipped home to Britain to make her home on the Yorkshire Moors with her only surviving relative — the widowed and still grieving Archibald Craven (Caspar Phillipson), her uncle by marriage. In the face of Archibald’s still overwhelming grief — and a certain handicap that is vastly underplayed here — Archibald’s estate is managed by his malevolent brother Neville (Graham Bickley), a doctor who has no time for the new ward. Left largely to her own resources in a grand but decaying home, the prickly Mary is taken in hand by the housemaid Martha (Lauren Hood) and her brother Dicken (Jos Slovick), who introduce her to the joys of gardening. It is an introduction that leads her inevitably, almost magically, to a neglected garden once cultivated by her late Aunt Lily (Sophie Bould), a place still particularly haunted by Lily’s memory.

Working with the 1991 musical adaptation by playwright/lyricist Marsha Norman and composer Lucy Simon, director Anna Linstrum and choreographer Gavin Mitford give us a production that is nothing if not committed. In the novel, Burnett created a world steeped in the tradition of the Raj, gilded with the mystery of the Indian sub-continent and haunted by the memories of the too-soon departed — and that’s the world of this production.

But in their efforts to keep the story, Simons’ often overwrought score, and Francis O’Connor’s hyper-kinetic set all running like clockwork, it seems they’ve simply wound things too tight. And that would include the emotions of this piece, all of which seem to be worn prominently on the characters’ sleeves, despite the fact that Burnett set the story in a world of stiff upper-lips. The cast are tremendously committed, but too many characters lose themselves in the sentiment of the story, instead of simply getting on with it and leaving it up to us to figure it out.

Figuring it out is what good theatre — and childhood — is all about.