It’s nice to see a good set and you get that at the People’s, even if it isn’t quite what you see in the promotional photos which were taken at the wonderful Tanfield Railway.
Prominent on stage is the bridge over the rural branch line where Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis, the children of E Nesbit’s famous tale, have their adventures after moving with their mother from London to the Yorkshire Dales.
Their father has been arrested on espionage charges, you see, leaving his cossetted middle class family in dire straits and with no servants to look after them.
There are lots of birthdays, and in this particular production a succession of uneaten cakes. A fair few atmospheric blasts of steam, too, as the imaginary locomotives roar through the station overseen by Perks, the stationmaster.
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Director Chris Heckels-Thompson has worked with Mike Kenny’s award-winning script which allows the children to engage with the audience, breaking the convention of the ‘fourth wall’.
It works quite well, acknowledging the fact that it’s a modern and perhaps less credulous audience than would have first encountered the story in book form over a century ago.
Bobbie craves our indulgence when she and her siblings nip from one end of a tunnel to the other by running on the spot.
But the show begins with the three of them, as the young adults we see on stage, looking back on the events that made them the ‘railway children’ and then enacting them.
Ashton Matthews as Bobbie, the eldest (forever the Jenny Agutter role for those who remember the film of 1970), Stephanie Moore as Phyllis and Joe Moore as Peter are sharp and funny, bickering amiably, as kids do, and forever calling people “brick”, as kids apparently did.
Kay Edmundson is Mother who responds to sudden penury and her husband’s arrest not only by dragging the family and a load of suitcases to Yorkshire but by writing stories – something which must have seemed perfectly normal to E Nesbit but which makes her seem a rather peripheral figure.
While she is at her desk or having a lie down, the children take matters into their own hands, befriending Perks (Daniel Magee in what I must call the Bernard Cribbens role), the busy local doctor (Callum Mawston) and the Old Gentleman who returns their waves from the train and turns out to be key to everything.
Tony Childs plays a straight bat with this venerable master-of-all-the-talents whose miraculous powers of intervention seem to hover over the show like a giant unseen wink.
There’s also a mysterious Russian who pops up looking for his wife, Bill Harrington sporting a vaguely Cossack-style hat as Mr Szezcpansky whose book – well I never! – Mother has read.
That’s far too many spoilers. The Railway Children is a charming period piece much loved by those who have read the book and perhaps rather fancied Bobbie when that famous film was released.
This manifestation of it will appeal to the child in us all. How much it will appeal to actual children these days, I really have no idea. Perhaps it’s just what they’ve been waiting for.
The Railway Children runs until Saturday, July 20. Tickets via the People’s Theatre website.
