Ella Dacres (Alice Parslow) and Samuel Creasey (Malcolm Polstead)
(Picture: Manuel Harlan)Like the book it’s based on, Nicholas Hytner’s Christmas show for the Bridge is a galloping adventure full of wonder and confusion. The Book of Dust - La Belle Sauvage is the prequel to Philip Pullman’s phenomenally successful His Dark Materials trilogy, set in a retro-futurist fantasy world where every human has a soul-animal called a daemon.
Here, plucky youngsters Malcolm and Alice battle evil religious authorities in a flooded Oxford to save the baby who will grow into the trilogy’s heroine, Lyra. It’s presented by a tight ensemble cast with impressive performances from twentysomething newcomers Samuel Creasey and Ella Dacres. Puppeteers skillfully articulate illuminated origami daemons and designer Bob Crowley uses woodcut-style projections to great effect. You may sometimes be baffled, but never bored.
Familiarity with the earlier stories, already adapted for film and TV and by Hytner on stage at the National Theatre, would be a definite aid to comprehension. It helps if you’re au fait with Pullman’s adult protagonists and his belief that his hometown and its university are the centre of the universe. Not to mention his habitual mashup of Victorian and interwar technology, his hatred of organized religion, and the rather vague concept of a mysterious substance, dust, as a sort of animating human essence. You’ll also be prepared for his fondness for atmosphere and action over coherent plot.
Even though playwright Bryony Lavery has streamlined, clarified and occasionally improved the story, this remains a breathlessly hectic jumble of events, overlaid with a half-scientific, half-mystical humanist message. There’s also Pullman’s customary celebration of puberty – “the turmoil waging war in your pants,” as the villain Bonneville puts it – as a rite of passage. Though here it’s been carefully tailored to fit a world where the #MeToo movement has happened and we’re more aware of the sexual exploitation of children by adults and their own peers.
Creasey winningly plays 12-year-old Malcolm as an effusive bundle of curiosity, practicality and good-heartedness. Dacres’ 15-year-old Alice wears a defensive carapace of hurt that very gradually dissolves, especially when there’s an actual, real-life baby on stage. The audience melted at this, too.
Ayesha Dharker steps into the spike heels of the glamorous, deadly Mrs Coulter, successfully banishing memories of Ruth Wilson and Nicole Kidman in the part on the small and the big screen. Pip Carter’s Bonneville is a nasty, conspiratorial piece of work, his warped relationship with his malevolent hyena daemon indicative of his penchant for underage girls. For Pullman, the world is an exciting but dangerous place for children. The hyena itself is seriously creepy.
I suspect kids taken to see this show will gulp down its copious pleasures and skim over the difficult, grown-up bits. I left it, as I often do with Pullman’s work, simultaneously elated and deflated, exhausted from chasing one narrative high after another.
Bridge Theatre, to Feb 26; bridgetheatre.co.uk
