★★★☆☆
Three Stars
In a Guardian review of Stephen Wright’s adaptation of ‘His Dark Materials’ at the National Theatre in 2003, Michael Billington described the play as ‘like a clipped hedge compared to Philip Pullman’s forest’. He notes that Pullman’s tale is a complex exploration of much theologically-themed fiction, which suffers from being culled for stage. As an admirer of Pullman’s work, whilst I agree that the adaptation itself is somewhat lacking in the story’s original magic, I found this production to be a valiant attempt at the difficult task of telling the epic adventures of Lyra and Will. Performing this play in Oxford gave it an extra level of meaning that could not have been achieved anywhere else: not least including the ironic mockery of the academics at the fictional ‘Jordan’ College – known as Exeter to you and I.
The production was well directed, by Madeleine Perham, and confidently acted save a few rough edges. Among the most memorable performances were those of Christian Bevan, who maturely played Lord Asrael and was painfully succesful at portraying the harsh father-figure, and Will Yeldham, who played the slimy Lord Boreal. A good word must also be given for Alex Mckenzie’s portrayal of Roger, who played the curious boy startlingly well, making his cruel demise at the end of the first part all the more horrific. Alex Sage’s Lyra was also well-performed – an impressive transformation to a 12-year-old girl. Her energy is the drive of this production. At points the child-like energy became a bit tiring. We might have seen more of the sensitive Lyra, of her conflicts and passions, since the story places us in the position of watching her grow from a child to a young woman.
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Theo Chevalier was perfectly cast as the voice for the puppet of Pantalaimon, Lyra’s daemon. Clearly it is challenging to achieve this convincingly, and he was the most successful at this in the production. However, I was not entirely convinced by the use of War Horse-esque puppets to represent the daemons. Although the idea has potential, under the conditions of a student production it is logistically impossible to have a daemon for every character. As a result only the main character’s daemons were portrayed. Daemons are the most inviting parts of Pullman’s world, and are the idea that drives the story. The lack of them onstage made it difficult to relate to the feeling of shock at Lyra’s first sighting of a child without a daemon. More confusing is that fact that it is impossible to portray the daemons changing shape, which in the books is what provides the cathartic heart-wrench of watching Lyra and Will grow and their daemons fix. Indeed, in this production Pantalaimon was permanently a pine martin, which I imagine will remove the climax of his fixing form during the part 2 production next term.
Just before I left the theatre, I heard a stranger exclaim to a friend: ‘I had no idea what was going on’. I do wonder, then, whether as someone who knows the stories inside out, I am the right person to be reviewing this production – I could be both over-critical and too generous, considering that I know the story inside out. But overall, the fact that not all of the first book and a half could be squeezed into one small production served to remind me that I want to reread the books I discovered as a child, now as a student in the Oxford of ‘our’ Universe.
