Earlier this year, a number of theatre professionals shared, via Twitter, stories of being rejected for jobs because their “only” theatre experience involved working with young people. So wrong! As this world premiere of Roald Dahl’s short story, along with other productions reviewed on these pages over the past few weeks, demonstrates, youth theatre requires at least as much skill as supposedly “adult” theatre. Here, it demands even more. Not only must director Ben Harrison and his talented company transport their audience to an Indian jungle, London casinos, the world of social media etc, they must – and do – present seemingly impossible feats of magic.
Social media? The original story of the transformation of debonair Henry Sugar (David Rankine) from spoilt rich man to selfless philanthropist is, of course, computer-free. However, Rob Drummond’s adaptation extends Dahl’s Chinese box-style narrative to include a new character, teenager Mary (Eve Buglass), alone in her bedroom (in Becky Minto’s inspired design, this is an actual box that moves around the many-curtained stage as freely as the laptop screen it mimics). For Henry and Mary, “enough is never enough”: he craves money, she solicits followers for her just-created social media account. Their lives are transformed by their separate encounters with a book/ebook in which India-based Dr Cartwright (Rosalind Sydney) narrates the story of Imhrat Khan (Johndeep More), the man “who could see without using his eyes”.
Through Mary, Drummond introduces a cautionary-tale quality to the story that effectively highlights the message of the Roald Dahl Story Company (a co-producer along with Perth theatre and Helen Milne Productions) about “the power of kindness”. This moral focus blunts Dahl’s ironic narrative tone, but it builds a dramatic impetus necessary to the stage action (further enlivened by wittily managed direct interactions with the audience, who threatened, on press night, to upstage the actors – a man leaping up to defend his wife’s honour from Sugar/Rankine’s flirty ad lib raised a gale of laughter and round of applause). As to feats described in the story – of levitation, mind-reading, seeing through solid objects – the combined talents of the cast with Fergus Dunnet (illusions), Simon Wilkinson (lighting), Scott Twynholm (sound and music) and Lewis den Hertog (projections) work magic. In youth theatre, as in all theatre, seeing is believing.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is at Perth theatre until 2 April, then touring
