Marianne Dreams

Published Thursday 20 December 2007 at 15:40 by Heather Neill

What would children’s theatre do without children’s literature? It would be brave of a major theatre company to commission a new play for the seasonal show but, meanwhile, novels are providing challenging material - War Horse at the National and Noughts and Crosses in Stratford are testament to the available quality.

And now at the Almeida we have a version of psychologist Catherine Storr’s disturbing and exciting 1958 story of Marianne who, confined to bed by illness, draws with an antique pencil a world which can be entered only in dream. Marianne invents a boy who turns out to be Mark, a real boy suffering from polio. They have a domestic existence, then a frightening one in her sketched house as one-eyed stone watchers close in, while in their waking hours the children fight back to health. The book does not end satisfactorily for drama, but it is a shame that Moira Buffini, who is otherwise true to its exploration of the power of imagination, has the children meet in non-dreaming life.

Dance and soaring strings express emotion in director Will Tuckett and composer Paul Englishby’s dreamy storytelling. Selina Chilton is convincingly childlike as inventive ten-year-old Marianne and Mark Arends is gawky, if too mature, as the boy.

The climax, awash with projected eyes in Anthony Ward’s design, is satisfactorily scary, although the price paid for fluidity between dream and everyday is that the strange house never seems quite the prison it is in the book.