Secrets

Published Monday 25 February 2008 at 13:00 by Susan Elkin

You’d have to be extraordinarily insensitive and iron-hearted not to be smiling through tears at the end of this powerful emotional roller coaster, the thrust of which is that a child in a ‘privileged’ home can be just as unhappy as one living in a different world a few hundred yards away on a deprived estate.

India, exquisitely played by Sarah-Lee Dicks, who gets the sad, hurt innocence just right, lives with a manic, health-obsessed, career-focused mother (Kate Copeland), a drunken philandering father with money worries (Benedict Martin) and a depressed, secretly pregnant, Australian au pair (Charlotte Allam). In contrast is Kerry Gooderson’s diminutive, bespectacled, asthmatic, common, sensible Treasure who is victim to her mum’s violent boyfriend and taken in by her straight-talking Nan (Nicky Goldie) who exudes love and decency, has a boyfriend in prison and teaches line dancing.

Both girls are friendless until, by chance, they meet and realise what a lot they have in common including their both being diarists. The poignant developments thereafter are partly driven by India’s ongoing escapist obsession with Anne Frank.

The ending, as usual in Jacqueline Wilson’s perceptive stories, is happy but tempered with realism.

The piece is excellent ensemble theatre firmly glued together by seven fine performances with slick, adept doubling. Allam is totally convincing as Treasure’s useless, torn mother, and I enjoyed Goldie’s Irish cleaning lady and Martin’s accurately observed, aggressive, amoral Terry. Vicky Ireland’s direction is as impeccable as usual and Keith Baker provides a strikingly versatile split-level set based on grid-like coloured panels in three dimensions.