The epic grandiloquence of Philip Pullman’s breathtakingly subversive novels - centuries after the Inquisition it still feels liberatingly daring to be so overtly critical of church authority - upon which His Dark Materials is based makes this two-part play one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken in the theatre. But how Nicholas Hytner and his team bring it off.
The whole thrums with theatrical tension, ideas, action and spectacle in two substantial plays. The good versus evil plot weaves between a quasi-medieval Oxford, repressively controlled by chilling Catholic clerics, and its 21st century traffic-clogged incarnation. Threaded between are other geographical locations both real and imaginary - from Arctic plains and lands populated by splendidly masked armoured bears, witches and other forces to a grey, harpy-run Hell.
Rarely can the Olivier’s full revolve, operating in several planes to reveal set after set, have been so imaginatively used. It is almost filmic - the curtain call, taken by the 50-plus backstage crew at the end, is richly deserved.
In Pullman’s fictional worlds, most humans are attached to personal daemons - animal-shaped physical manifestations of the individual soul. Glowing, never-still puppets are lithely operated, Japanese style, by masked black-clad shadows. They add an unexpected dramatic depth - their reactions, effectively, a subtextual commentary on the thoughts of their alter egos.
At the heart of all this is the remarkable Anna Maxwell Martin, only 18 months out of LAMDA, playing the 12-year-old Lyra. An outstanding actress with an assured future before her, she brings to the part a combination of mercurial intensity, truculence, passion and waspish humour.
Well supported by the sensitively gravelly Dominic Cooper as Will Parry, Maxwell Martin adeptly sustains Lyra’s magnetism in this huge and demanding Hamlet-scale role.
Patricia Hodge turns in a characteristically assured performance as Lyra’s crisp mother, Mrs Coulter, who starts off pretty evil but eventually achieves a redemption of sorts. And Niamh Cusack makes her breathily high-voiced chief witch reasonably convincing, if a bit thin on range.
Timothy Dalton, however, inclines to woodenness and is sometimes guilty of garbling his words as Lord Asriel, especially in Part One.
Jonathan Dove’s atmospheric music for an eight-piece band, immaculately led by Stephen Ellis, is yet another highly successful strand in this deeply moving, profound but also gloriously entertaining production.
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