A retro pleasure fashioned from Malcolm Saville’s children’s books that have much in common with Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series (there’s even a girl with a boy’s name and a dog), Alice Birch’s clever adaptation takes us back to an era when children roamed freely and had adventures, people actually said “none of your beeswax” and to be a boy called Dickie didn’t make everyone fall about laughing.
When the teenage David (Ed Hartland) and his younger siblings, identical twins Dickie (Tom Cawte) and Mary (Katherine Carlton), meet Petronella, known as Peter (Anya Collyer), the stage is set for a series of adventures.
The children make dens, swear oaths of loyalty, travel widely across the UK on their own, make up secret signals, solve mysteries, uncover spies and generally get the better of the baddie, Miss Ballinger, a woman whose generosity with chocolate fudge cake is never to be trusted.
Pentabus is touring the production in a tent to National Trust sites over the summer, and director Elizabeth Freestone’s spritely production captures the heartiness of the adventures, but injects some delicacy, too. If the lack of a focus on a single adventure can make it feel a bit episodic and lacking in real tension, the show is fast paced with an unexpectedly moving payoff when the reason for the framing device becomes apparent: the children are all grown up and revisiting their younger, more adventurous selves.
That makes it a show as much for adults looking for their own lost childhood as it does for children looking for adventure. But mostly it’s just a terrific wheeze, and one that rejects the possibility of coming across as absurdly old-fashioned through constant inventiveness and the use of simple but effective contemporary theatre techniques, including on-stage sound effects and role-swapping. A treat for all ages, including “proper growed-ups”.
- At Buckland Abbey, Devon, on 6-9 August. Then touring. Details: pentabus.co.uk
