It’s typical of her unflashy control of every production element.
In what is a spectacular National Theatre debut, Rudd’s conjuring of claustrophobia in an open space is seriously impressive. Her insidious and vicious control of the family’s minds – and the audience’s sensitivity to terror – is dramatized with perfectly judged simplicity. Imagine Miranda Richardson as Mary Poppins and you’re only halfway to the horror.Īudible shivers ripple through the audience, wrapped around three sides of the open stage, as horribly smiling Ursula slips unexpectedly through doorways that vanish and reappear before everyone’s eyes. Still scarier is the infiltration of the other world’s many-limbed monster into Alex’s home and his family in the scarily sweet and reasonable persona of Ursula Monkton. Thanks to extraordinary work by costume and puppet-designer, Samuel Wyer, puppet director Finn Caldwell and the typically imaginative movement work of Steven Hoggett (“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” “Curious Incident”), what the two of children find in that ocean is terrifying, all the more so because the design work feels, in the best sense, home-spun rather than manufactured. With more than a nod to Narnia, this is, among other things, a celebration of storytelling. That’s certainly true of Lettie’s duckpond in the wooded garden (a creepy thicket designed by Fly Davis), which turns out to be an ocean not only of water but of time and space through which the two can travel. So far, so fairy-tale, and as in all good fairy-tales, almost everything in the story is not what it seems. Hempstock), all living in a house that has been there for centuries in the age-old woods. Teaming up with Alex, she take him home to her mother Ginnie (Carlyss Peers) and her grandmother (aka Old Mrs. That moment, like the entire show, is charged with conflicting emotions, since this was the day when his bookish, awkward younger self, played with pained and touching restraint by Samuel Blenkin, discovered a dead body.Īs motherless Alex attempts to sort out his jumbled emotions, a confident, knowing young girl, Lettie Hempstock (Marli Siu) appears. From there, he and the audience are catapulted back to the exact same place but on his 12th birthday.
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