The Stage

Mary Rose

Published Monday 27 October 2008 at 13:10 by Thom Dibdin

Eeriness abounds in Tony Cownie’s welcome new production of Barrie’s little performed but beautifully constructed twenties ghost story. It both ensures its success as straightforward entertainment and also helps give his new final twist the force to provide the play with a modern-day relevance.

Set on a beautifully proportioned lonely Hebridean isle and in your standard lonely haunted house, Neil Murray’s design slips easily between isle and house - in both its post-First World War wrack and ruin and its former, late-Victorian glory. Top marks to the technical staff for the production’s smooth transparency and Philip Pinsky for his understated soundtrack.

Kim Gerard is a beautifully judged Mary Rose who, when a girl, disappeared mysteriously from the isle - to return a month later unaware that she was ever gone. Gerard has a delicate innocence, tempered with a very strong sense of the other, as she skips into the house, asking her parents to let her marry young Simon Blake.

Michael Mackenzie and Anne Kidd give an easy sense of convivial, older parents in the Victorian scenes, Perri Snowdon is creditably stiff as the rather stuffy Simon and Robin Laing is superb as egalitarian gillie, Cameron. In the book-ending, post-First World War scenes, Una McLean smoothly creates the spiky housekeeper and Guy Fearon is easily believable as an Australian soldier.

Ironically, as Barrie’s underlying theme is impermanence in time passing, the production is weak in the portrayal of characters changed by time. Yet that matters little, as it wraps the plot tightly and unsprings a finale haunting enough to chill long after curtain fall.