Review by Mark Fisher
Something Wicked This Way Comes
7 Oct 2008 in Dance & Drama
Dundee Rep, 2 October 2008, and touring
Graham Kent, Andrew Clark, Michael Gray, Jennifer Paterson and Patrick Mulvey (photo - Douglas McBride)
TIME WAS when children’s theatre was little more than a babysitting service and the grown-ups kept their distance. Not any more. With Scottish companies as talented as Wee Stories, currently on the road with the truly family friendly One Giant Leap, and Catherine Wheels, here collaborating with the National Theatre of Scotland on Ray Bradbury’s spooky classic, the adults don’t even need the excuse of a child to see the work. Something Wicked This Way Comes is a gripping piece of theatre whatever your age.
It’s the story of two 13-year-old boys, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, their surnames carrying echoes of Halloween and night time, who are awoken in the early hours of one morning by the arrival of a train. The ancient steam locomotive is carrying Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, a sinister fun fair promising more than just sideshow attractions.
Will (Michael Gray) is always one step behind the mischievous Jim (Patrick Mulvey), whose love of a risk draws them perilously into the orbit of Mr Dark, aka the Illustrated Man, played by Andrew Clark with all the charm of an evil ringmaster.
What Dark offers is the thing they most desire: the opportunity to be grown-up. For Will’s father (Graham Kent), a slow-to-act librarian who regrets marrying late, he offers the opposite: the chance to be young again. Of course, they would also lose themselves as part of the Faustian bargain and so from out of this battle of good versus evil emerges a parable about the need to live in the moment, whatever your age.
Gill Robertson’s production brings all this to life with tremendous assurance. The set, by designer Karen Tennent, of two-tier wooden houses around a circular playing area proves brilliantly adaptable, allowing the action to move seamlessly from hall of mirrors to book-filled library and all over the Illinois town. David Paul Jones provides a suitably haunting live score for piano, squeezebox and cello, adding to the creepiness of the back-projected video by Jonathan Charles.
Younger audiences (it’s billed for the over-9s) will tune in to the classic struggle between good and evil, complete with Jennifer Paterson’s flying Dust Witch, while adults will engage with the more subtle ideas about the passage of time – not to mention a great story consummately told.
(Something Wicked This Way Comes is at the Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, on 11 October 2008)
© Mark Fisher, 2008
