At 11.32am, Kat and Ted's teenage cousin Salim enters a pod on the London Eye. At 12.02am, it descends and opens. But Salim does not get off. What has happened to him, and how is it possible for somebody to disappear into thin air? With the adults falling apart and the police failing to come up with any clues, it's up to the children to solve the mystery. Nobody is better at it than Ted, a teenage boy with Asperger's who doesn't like the theatre or being kissed but who does like the shipping forecast and formulating theories.
With its strong narrative drive, this novel by the children's writer Siobhan Dowd, who died of breast cancer in 2007, is transformed into a gripping show, and in Ted (John Cockerill, very good) it has an original and memorable hero, a bright, oddball child who can see the bigger picture when all the adults are blind to it. Created by writer Carl Miller and director Rosamunde Hutt, there is much to enjoy here, even if it never matches the imaginative sweep of the same team's glorious adaptation of Journey to the River Sea.
London looks drab in Anna Fleischle's ugly design (the design team don't know the difference between King's Cross and Euston stations, either), and while the Tempest motif is integral to the plot, it's not layered into the script or production sufficiently well. There are oddities, too. Early on, the production seems to be about to turn into a musical, and then decides otherwise. Salim's relationship with his friend Marcus is not fully developed, and the tensions between the adults often manifest themselves as outright hysteria in a production that tends towards the frenetic. It's a watchable romp, but it lacks the combination of narrative and emotion that makes Dowd's books so memorable.
