If the spirit moves you…
Is mesmerised by the new stage adaptation of at
Another home video has gone viral this week, attracting more than 17million views. Part of a trend for making children think they’ve turned invisible (and filming their response), it shows an American girl panicking that a vanishing act has accidentally worked on her.
Her family pretend she’s nowhere to be seen, “proof ” supplied by a photograph appearing to confirm she’s no longer in the living room. Her reaction? Wailing upset that’s shamefully entertaining and appalling to behold (she’s fine now).
The Lovely Bones, the first stage adaptation – by Bryony Lavery (playwright) and Melly Still (director) – of Alice Sebold’s bestselling novel of 2002, serves up a mesmerising theatrical equivalent to that DIY act of “ghosting”. It uses the simple means of actors appearing oblivious to one of their number to foster a potent sense of a young girl finding herself dismayingly cut off from those closest to her – here a lasting state, not a wind-up.
Part inspired by Sebold’s own traumas, the book daringly unfolds the first-person narrative of 14-yearold Susie Salmon from Norristown, Pennsylvania, who, after school one December afternoon in 1973, gets lured into a cornfield hideaway by a pretend-kindly neighbour, then raped, murdered and dismembered.
Her “story” starts at her life’s end and follows her as she haunts the aftermath of the crime: the police investigation, the emotional fallout, the world moving on. She’s supposedly in heaven, but it looks like psychological purgatory: she can’t shape events, can’t get the culprit caught. Yet it’s not all tear-spilling frustration; a golden sunshine radiates from her resilient personality.
Peter Jackson came a cropper with his 2009 film version. Throwing cinematographic eye-candy at the problem of representing the restless, perturbed realm of Susie’s “afterlife”, he strayed into hallucinogenic kitsch. “A turkey, a pig’s ear, a mad cow of a film,” decided The Telegraph’s review.
Lavery – whose biggest theatrical hit, Frozen (1998), looked at the grim legacy of a 10-year-old girl’s abduction and murder – grasps the potential pitfalls in terms of tone. And her approach – working in tandem with Still’s rare knack for achieving a rich fluidity of action – is to spirit up a faithful levity, preventing things plummeting towards mawkishness.
The scenes are like scraps thrown together, exchanges cut to the bone, enabling us to share the disorientation that besets Charlotte Beaumont’s wide-eyed Susie. We’re hardly settled before Keith Dunphy’s Mr Harvey is making his foul, predatory move, the ordeal suggested by an orgy of manically tossed clothing – tasteful, yes, but perturbing too, not dismissive of the horror but reinforcing the brutal suddenness of it.
There’s a technical finesse here – requiring a barrage of tightly timed cues – that affirms just how state of the art a touring production can be. Ana Inés Jabares-Pita’s ingenious set design riffles the box of tricks that served melodramas of old: a large, slanted, suspended mirror carries a hint of the Pepper’s Ghost illusion, affording glimpses of figures behind it but also creating an eerie correspondence between the everyday world on the stage-floor and its ethereal reflection.
Not everything is persuasive: the moment Susie body-swaps with a former schoolmate to experience carnal bliss with a boy she fancied feels too ghoulish by half. But that doesn’t defeat the overall poignancy. “I see her everywhere,” says Susie’s mother (Emily Bevan), who finds consolation in marital infidelity. “I see her hair but it doesn’t match her face. I see her body then it doesn’t move like her.”
Though it might sound like the purest hokum, what makes the show moving and truthful is the tacit understanding that it’s a fiction told to cope with an unimaginable nightmare – as much about laying to rest the agony of the bereaved as giving voice to the departed.
Lovely – but lacerating – stuff.