As I emerged from Bryony Lavery’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s much admired 2002 novel, I met a friend wreathed in tears. As with the recent version of A Monster Calls at the Old Vic, however, I found I was less moved by the content than mesmerised by the presentation. For me, it’s the skill of Melly Still’s production, Ana Inés Jabares-Pita’s design and Matt Haskins’ lighting that makes the evening work.
Sebold’s novel is not the easiest to stage. It views earthly life from the vantage point of Susie Salmon who, as a 14-year-old, was raped and murdered. In the book we share Susie’s heaven’s-eye view as she witnesses her dad’s possessive grief, her mother’s fretful isolation, her sister’s experiments with sex. While Susie craves the life she has lost, she looks benignly on her old school friends, views the tortured progress of her killer and even becomes, through her unseen presence, a means of healing family divisions.
Sebold writes at one point that “the line between the living and the dead could be murky and blurred”. Lavery and Still shrewdly seize on this to show Susie moving easily among the earthbound rather than occupying some heavenly perch. While Lavery deftly condenses the action into 100 minutes, what she can’t reproduce is the book’s eye for prosaic detail. In part, this is a story, reminiscent of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, about American suburban life where the plop of the daily paper on to the porch or a shy boy’s determination to wear gym shorts over his jeans are part of the fabric. Compared with Lavery’s Frozen, which entered the mind of a sexual predator, the killer also seems a one-dimensional figure.
What fascinates is the verve with which the story is told. The design is dominated by a vast tilted mirror that gives the audience a dual perspective: at any one moment, we are watching events as they unfold and seeing them reflected from above. Key events are also ingeniously presented. Susie’s rape and murder are evoked through the random dispersal of her clothes and, when her father angrily smashes a snow globe, the cast brandish shards of broken glass. Even the potentially mawkish moment when Susie meets her killer’s fellow victims is subtly done with the actors, like puppeteers, projecting their arms through the dresses of the violated.
This is the kind of show that directors such as Sally Cookson and Marianne Elliott have helped make popular: the highly theatrical novel adaptation. I still prefer the messy complexity of original plays, but this piece is extremely well done. Charlotte Beaumont is excellent as Susie in that she eschews cuteness and lends her a teenage stroppiness as well as seething with rage at the police’s incompetence. She even cheerfully announces that “sometimes heaven is a shit-hole, too”. Jack Sandle as a father poleaxed by loss, Emily Bevan as a mother seeking refuge in flight, and Ayoola Smart as a gifted sibling are equally good in a busy 10-strong cast.
If I came out of the theatre dry-eyed, I was still impressed by the evening’s ensemble vigour and collective cleverness.
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