A Monster Calls
Adapted from the novel by Patrick Ness Director: Sally Cookson
The Old Vic, The Cut, London SE1 (0844-871 7628). Until 25 August Not suitable for under-tens Running time: 2hrs 20mins (including interval)
★★★★ This “strange, soaring yet miraculously unsentimental” adaptation of Patrick Ness’s book – about a troubled 13-year-old boy, Conor, whose mother is dying of cancer – is a must-see production, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. Bring your teenagers and your parents; bring your friends and your neighbours. And “bring tissues, lots of tissues”. It is “heartbreaking, spectacular, harsh, happy”, and it leaves you, as my 13-year-old observed, “about as unbored as you could ever be in a theatre”. Working with writer Adam Peck and the actors themselves, Sally Cookson has devised a show of wondrous effects using just the actors’ bodies and simple props. But “amid all the aerialism, spectacle and bursts into song, we get incredibly intimate scenes. Massive sadness, but zero sappiness.” It deserves to be “a monster hit”.
Cookson has conjured the book’s tricky mix of “hefty themes and slender-ish storyline” into two “fleet, fluid, spellbinding hours” of theatrical magic, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. The 2016 film version brought lavish Hollywood effects to a story in which a giant yew tree – or rather, “a yew tree giant” – comes knocking at night, offering Conor “tales loaded with psychoanalytical wisdom”. Cookson relies on superb live music – a “mercurial array” of pulsating electronica, plangent piano and much else from composer Benji Bower – and a “physically symbiotic, multitasking company”. Matthew Tennyson’s stunning performance as Conor is so “immensely affecting – his head downcast, pale features impassive, eyes sorrowful, body rigid” – that it made me want to see him play Hamlet.
Many were sobbing at the end, said Michael Billington in The Guardian, but because the monster’s message is that we should be emotionally honest, I’ll admit I wasn’t. To borrow from Keats, I felt the piece had “a palpable design upon us”. But there’s no denying that Michael Vale’s brilliant design, in which ropes are used to evoke everything from the gnarled branches of a yew tree to a wicked queen’s crown and a car’s steering wheel, makes for “exhilarating” theatre.
The week’s other opening
Three Musketeers Williamson Park, Lancaster ( The Dukes, 01524-598500). Until 18 August Themes of kindness and inclusivity (there’s a female D’artagnan) are threaded cleverly through Hattie Naylor’s “sword-flashing, silksrustling” version of the Dumas classic, staged in a wonderfully romantic setting (Observer).