Emotional jab to the heart that will leave you on the ropes
A Monster Calls (The Old Vic) Verdict: Touching story of childhood sorrow
EVeRY so often, you come across a show that jabs you to the bone. The Old Vic’s A Monster Calls, first seen in Bristol, did that to me.
The story is about a teenage english boy, Conor, whose divorced mother is dying of cancer. I won’t go into the personal reasons that resonated and settle for saying there must be thousands of families for whom this is familiar and bruising territory.
Add to that an imaginative staging by director Sally Cookson and a central performance of rare, affecting simplicity by Matthew Tennyson as Conor and you have one of those productions that leaves you feeling still tender and slightly altered when next day you awake to pale, daunting dawn.
The Old V ic’s large stage is unadorned by much scenery or props, save for a few simple chairs and a host of ropes soon put to creative use.
High at the back , occasionally on view , are two musicians who play a jazzy-funk sort of score, with plenty of electronic percussion. There is also a recorded blast, at one point, of Khachaturian ( that passage used for The Onedin Line).
Conor is an unassuming , tidy lad who does the cleaning at the house he shares with his ailing mum. He is bullied at school and does not much like his only nearby relation, a grandmother. At night, he has bad dreams, their suffocating images shown as droplets of blood in water, projected on to the white back wall.
And many a night, always at seven minutes past 12, Conor is visited by a mysterious creature.
This bare -chested, adult figure — almost genie - like — is an embodiment of the yew tree in his garden. Though labelled a monster by the play, he calls himself ‘the eternal green man, the spine on which mountains hang’.
He takes Conor partly under his care and tells him three stories that are supposed to illustrate life’s contradictions and the necessity of self -belief and self-truth.
Indeed, sometimes painful truth can make lies necessary such are the paradoxes of life. I hope that this does not make the show sound too precious. The story rattles along and much of it is rather thrilling , not so much for narrative reasons as the way it is told.
The ropes are twisted and gathered and shaped and swung to convey all manner of events.
One moment, a piece of rope depicts a steer - ing wheel in the grandmother’s car. next, it is a pillow . next, it is the great yew itself.
Yew trees are rooted deeply in england’s psyche. They can live to 3,000 years and, in our churchyards, are often older than the buildings, having been planted by the ancients at burial grounds to ward off wickedness (and cattle).
Have you ever lived next to one? They really can seem to acquire a spiritual presence. The yew is poisonous, yet somehow, it protects us. Another paradox. Marianne Oldham plays the mother , Selina Cadell the grandmother and Stuart Goodwin the monster. Mr T ennyson, who apparently is descended from the poet, is top-rate as Conor. The boy keeps speaking of his certainty that his mother will recover. We know this is not the case. There he sits with his morning bowl of Shreddies, asserting his belief in Mum ’s latest treatment. everything is going to be all right. Isn ’t it? Isn’t it? The contrast of immense, impending sadness and mundane, innocent domesticity is terribly powerful. By the end, many audience members were openly in tears.