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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Arifa Akbar

The Railway Children review – a real steam train is the spectacular star

The Railway Children at Keighley & Worth Valley Railway.
Heady sense of motion … The Railway Children at Keighley & Worth Valley Railway. Photograph: Bradford 2025

This site-specific experience begins with a ride on a stream train. Audiences travel to a purpose-built auditorium inside an engine shed at Oxenhope station. It is a delightful mood-setter to Mike Kenny’s adaptation of E Nesbit’s 1905 novel, which premiered in 2008. It is back on the road, this time chugging its way along the same five-mile line comprising the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway on which the Green Dragon travelled in Lionel Jeffries’ iconic 1970 film.

Inside the shed, the impressive stagecraft arrests the senses over the story of Roberta (Farah Ashraf), Peter (Raj Digva) and Phyllis (Jessica Kaur), the children forced out of their well-to-do London home and into a shambling house by the tracks in Yorkshire, after their father (Paul Hawkyard) is wrongly imprisoned.

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