NARNIA RETURNS
Shaw Festival builds a magical, imaginary world in The Magician’s Nephew,
“Let’s make Narnia!”
This is the invitation of the lion Aslan (Kyle Blair) to the audience in this frequently enchanting adaptation by Michael O’Brien of the C.S. Lewis classic, which opens the 2018 Shaw Festival season.
The sixth of seven Narnia fantasy novels to be published, The
Magician’s Nephew comes first in the series’ fictional chronology and it’s all about worldbuilding.
Director Tim Carroll’s approach embodies this spirit of collective make-believe on multiple levels. Although stunning design, engaging performances and a smart approach to audience engagement all work together successfully, multiple narrative layers initially threaten to bog the production down.
It’s aimed at family audiences (aged 6 plus). There were 375 schoolchildren at the matinee I attended and their enthusiastic buy-in to these participatory elements became part of the show’s entertainment value.
The action is framed by the “Dream Detectives:” the acting ensemble dressed in early-20th-century tweeds, using English accents and telling the audience that they’re seeking out shared dreams among the spectators.
They identify the story of a boy searching for a way to cure his sick mother and the plot of The Magician’s Nephew is just about launched — but not before an extraneous extra scene set in contemporary North America that underestimates the audience’s capacity to connect to the material.
Things get up and running once we meet young Digory (Travis Seetoo) and his neighbour, Polly (Vanessa Sears), as they adventure in the attics of their London row houses and chance on the lair of his magician uncle Andrew (Steven Sutcliffe).
Lured by Uncle Andrew, Digory and Polly put on brightly coloured rings and plummet into the Wood Between the Worlds: a time-travelling journey communicated through lighting changes, fast-moving cartons and Cameron Davis’s extraordinary projection design.
Via trips to the ancient world of Charn, where they pick up an unwelcome fellow traveller in the witch queen Jadis (Deborah Hay), and back through London, Digory and Polly end up in the nascent land of Narnia, with Jadis, Uncle Andrew, a cockney cabbie (Michael Therriault) and his carriage horse (Matt Nethersole) in tow.
We then hear the faint sound of music: the song of Aslan, breathing a new world into being.
This is where the production was at its most magical for me, as Davis’s pixilated projections resolve into gorgeous rolling countryside, a lamppost grows centre stage and the ensemble put on beautifully crafted cardboard masks to become animals.
The audience’s buy-in is required to make all these elements of design and performance come together: we build the imaginary world with the company.
Lewis’s book includes some broad comic set pieces, and Carroll and the cast lean into this to entertaining effect. Young audience members loved Sutcliffe’s wild scheming and eventual comeuppance as Uncle Andrew, and there are touches of Absolutely Fabulous and an English pantomime dame in Hay’s Jadis (who transforms into The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe’s White Witch).
Seetoo and Sears pull off the tricky challenge of playing children without being cloying, and Blair’s physical poise and gravitas make him a compelling Aslan.
On the basis of its engagement with young people alone, Shaw’s new season is off to an exciting start.