Angela Carter and Shared Experience were made for each other. The sensual, dream-like qualities of the writer are given full expression in the theatre company's physical style, in which the conscious and unconscious wrap around each other like lovers entwined. This is a fabulous, fantastical, melting evening, tracing the internal and external journey from childhood to adulthood.
Melanie is first glimpsed in the Edenic garden of her family home, taking a taste of forbidden fruit - or rather, trying on her absent mother's wedding dress. For the sin of trying to grow up too quickly, she is flung out of paradise when her parents are killed in a plane crash, and sent with her brother and sister to Uncle Philip's, the appalling toymaker who won't let anyone play with his creations and winds up his family like clockwork toys. Here, in the sinister house of secrets, where Uncle Philips's wife has been struck dumb and slippery young apprentice Finn dreams of revenge and revolution, Melanie must relinquish her girlish romanticism and face up to the harsh realities of life and sex. She must taste the dirt before she can be reborn as a confident young woman.
Like the book, the play works on several levels: the domestic and mythic, the literal and symbolic, dream and reality. Liz Cooke's extraordinary design is a boat or ark adrift on the treacherous waves, in which heaven and hell, knowledge and secrets coexist. Bryony Lavery's dramatisation, dreamy and sharp as a blade, is as much a work of art as Carter's dark, ripe masterpiece.
Rebecca Gatward's production rather hurries the final conflagration and Melanie and Finn's rebirth, but this is a remarkably mature piece of work, combining a filmic accessibility with thrilling theatrics that explode in the most unexpected ways. Hannah Watkins is superb as the young Melanie, catching every tremble of the heart as she makes her faltering way towards womanhood, but, as always with Shared Experience, this is a genuine ensemble piece. I can hardly wait to see it again.
Until September 22, then touring. Box office: 01484 430528.
