Brighton Year-Round 2023

Tom’s Midnight Garden

Brighton Little Theatre

Genre: Adaptation, Children's Theatre, Costume, Drama, Family, Fringe Theatre, Live Music, Puppetry, Theatre

Venue: Brighton Little Theatre

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

This is the most enchanting and poignant Christmas work Brighton Little Theatre have mounted in their ten-year panto tradition. Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden, adapted by David Wood  and directed by Steven Adams, plays till December 16^th.

Philip Pulman, on hearing in 2007 his own Northern Lights trilogy was the favourite children’s book ever, said: ”The initials PP are right, but the name’s wrong and in 100 years Philippa Pearce’s work will be top.” It came second then. Its poignant timeslip from 1958 (its year of publication) to the 1880s and 1890s in the same house came in an ongoing timeslip tradition for children; but far surpasses any of them.

Tom (Daniel Carr), to avoid his brother’s measles is sent to stay with his Aunt Gwen (Tess Gill, also ferocious 1880s Aunt Grace, in neat contrasting performances) and Uncle Alan (cheerily rational Leigh Ward, also Abel 1880s harrumphing bible-bashing but kindly gardener who can also see Tom).

Carr is wonderful as the boy who complains of his loneliness in a mildly whining pitch to Peter (Bradley Coffey) to whom he confides in letters everything that happens. As Bradley winningly lisps through each one his character is ordered to burn it. Carr’s mix of mischief warmth and innocence is so transparently Tom you forget he’s an adult.

Confined to his room Tom sneaks out at midnight as the clock chimes and instead of the estate being built around the old house, discovers a sunlit garden. Which isn’t there any more. And Hatty (Holly Everett), equally lonely, despised by her Aunt Grace, is as glad to see him, as he her. She claims she’s a princess. He discovers she lived in his room, and can find things of hers there. This produces a masterstroke.

Except it’s not a simple nightly timeslip visit. Tom’s visits last seconds in 1958 but hours, it seems in the late 1880s. But each time he returns, Hatty’s a bit older. She overtakes his 12; her life overtakes them both.

Everett’s poised between fun and sadness, giving a palpable sense she’s so despised by her aunt and one cousin at least, she’s invisible. Everett though also brings raptness to Hatty’s childhood, subtly conveying a sense that though Tom’s always the same, she’s changing.

Back in 1958 Tom dodges his aunt and uncle’s landlady, old Mrs Bartholomew (Ann Atkins, exquisitely observed at the end) always balefully setting the clock to strike 13, it seems, which is when Tom escapes.

This timeslip story packs more of a punch than any other. The novel, here masterfully adapted by Wood, yields more complexity, and more in common with Priestley’s time plays and even TS Eliot’s Four Quartets which it references with Revelations: ‘An end of time’. Hardly surprising. Like both writers Cambridge-educated Pearce was referencing J W Dunne’s An Experiment With Time. And Cambridge and the very house she grew up in is here transformed into Castleford, university neatly banished.

Adams’ set is as ingenious as the Giant Peach last year, though here with exits entrances and reverses marking his and Tom Williams’ design and painting leads. Here an array of doors and reversible panels stage-left become both 1958, 1888 wood-panelled and part of the garden including greenhouse. The clock vanishes into a sun dial, a screen opposite on which the title’s projected reveals Tom’s – and Hatty’s – bed. At one poignant moment Tom falls asleep next to Hatty: when he wakes, he’s back alone in 1958.

With an 11-strong ensemble and deft blocking of this door-permeable world, Patti Griffiths’ movement works its maze cleanly. Beverley Grover’s lighting dials through intense sun to intense midnight, lightning, a wintry dazzle. Richard and Marcus Harvey’s sound comes with remarkable thunder, and recorded voices: an atmospheric component of the plot. Costumes this time – both 1958 (funkier red and white like a footballs strip for Tom) and the 1880s are modelled by Bradley Coffey, Monica Quinn, Kit Ellis; with wigs as ever by  Patti Griffiths

There’s work with those voices live too. Apart from other roles Georgia Mills, Amy Lacey, Rosalind Caldwell, Dixie Humberstone Ford, Kevin Aylward pronounce  as Voices offstage, even  once as on-stage chorus or singly.

Tom realises that apart from Abel, as we learn, he doesn’t need to dodge: no-one but Hatty sees him. Not amiable servant Susan (Georgia Mills, a warm touch in a chilly house) angling for Abel, and as neutral cousin Hubert. Nasty Edgar (a natty pranking Dixie Humberstone Ford, also an Ely Cathedral Tower Guide towards the end), and sympathetic, anxious James (Rosalind Caldwell, balancing warmth, justice, and keen sense of family anxiety); who’ll be dispossessed his mother grace tells him, if he marries Hatty. But he’s not the man for her.

That turns out to be Pincher the dog, Kevin Aylward’s first incarnation with one of the puppets – but also Irish charmer Barty, and the Angel.

Aylward sweeps Everett’s Hatty off in the white garden-seat-cum coach to skating, and the latter part of the play translates there, to Tom’s bemusement. Things change, but in an ingenious slip Tom asks Hatty to bury her skates in her secret place where he’ll find them in 1958, which she duly does. De-rusting them he brings them back in time, so (pure Dunne this) the same pair of skates are on Hatty’s and Tom’s feet (nominally). Griffiths has worked the skating scene beautifully.

Another Skater – and Sightseer – is one of four newcomers (with Mills, Humberstone, Aylward), Amy Lacey. She particularly enchants with holding a twittering Bird aloft; it sings its summer out. Mimi Goddard – Glenys Harries-Rees’s assistant directing must be prominent in these scenes – also works a magnificent honking puppetry of geese: several cast-members chase in and out of the garden with them gloved. To Abel’s fury.

There’s a heart-warming rendition of ‘Good King Wenceslas’ at the end we’re enjoined to join, arranged by musical director Ella Turk-Thompson. We don’t, it’s too good with the 11-strong cast to spoil. I see why a cheery seasonal end’s desired, and Turk-Thompson’s arrangement works beautifully. Really though the poignant ending – no reveals here – is stronger as it is.

Adams triumphs as director and set-designer. This is an absolutely first-rate ensemble. They tell the story with all the wide-eyed wonder of real enchantment, beyond Christmas, beyond, perhaps time. Its deeper resonances might sound with an Angelic boom over the heads of children, but there’s no condescension in this layered telling, or in Pearce’s original. A gem.

Published December 11, 2023December 12, 2023 by Simon Jenner