Lancaster Royal Grammar School
and Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School
The Grand Theatre, Lancaster
15 - 18 May 2006

What makes a good school production? Presumably, one that provides a valuable educational and artistic experience for a large number of young actors and a memorable night out for the audience – those who are not immediate family members as well as those who are. Writing as a (not entirely unbiased) parent of a child who is a student in one of the schools but who was not in the cast, I can confirm that this production was indeed memorable – in the most positive sense of the term.

His Dark Materials is, by any account, an ambitious choice for a school production. First, Philip Pullman’s original text is long (a trilogy: Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass), and this length is reflected in the playscript, needing a huge amount of preparation, and resulting in two evenings at the theatre for those who wish to experience the play fully. This requires an audience willing to make something of an investment in terms of time.

His Dark Materials is also an intellectually complex, philosophical and indeed controversial play. It is about regeneration, casting off fetters, pushing back boundaries, life affirmation. Its themes include quests for knowledge and power, parallel worlds, predestination and freewill, what it means to be a child and to grow up, the contestation of authority, and quantum physics. Good and evil exist in (unconventional) relation to the church and witchcraft – manifested in one scene in a battle between witches and clerics.

Lyra is another Eve, and the Christian idea of heaven is directly challenged. His Dark Materials however resists any simple binary idea that one group of people is in the right and a second in the wrong. The play has the potential to disturb in its unorthodox representations of parenting and of the value of truth-telling (‘Lyra the Liar’ in the first part becomes ‘Lyra Silvertongue’ in the second). The plot too is complex, making it a difficult watching experience for those who have not read at least the first book of Pullman’s three (Northern Lights).

Thirdly, the characters are not all human: women, men, girls and boys all have their own ‘daemons’, animal in form but in effect souls, or perhaps consciences. (Separation from one’s daemon means death – but not only death, and it is this that drives the first part of the story.) Accordingly, the first question that comes to mind on hearing about a performance of His Dark Materials is likely to be ‘But how are they going to do the daemons?’ This would not pose a problem for the 21st century film industry. And for theatre directors with large budgets, it would be a wonderful opportunity. Neither the Grand nor LRGS/LGGS, though, have the resources for complex arrangements of puppets (though puppets there are) and special effects that the Olivier National Theatre on London’s South Bank was recently able to use. But it is not making a virtue out of necessity to say that a production which consequently requires more of the audience in terms of imagination is surely what theatre is all about.

Fourthly, there is a large number of swiftly-changing scenes: twenty-five in Part 1, thirty-four in Part 2. Some eighteen of these are different settings - including journeys between them. This does not easily allow for the use of heavy scenery. Rather, in this production, a constant feature is the effective use of a single white bench in the middle of the stage, designed for two, but with the two halves facing different ways, representing different worlds. This is against a backdrop of a large Alethiometer (find out what this is on the first website listed below!).

Ambitious this production may have been, but the young actors (mostly junior rather than senior school students), and a few adults, carried it off well. There were frequent changes of pace. Sustaining one’s attention over six hours posed no problem at all; by Part 2 this audience member, at least, felt that she had nicely settled in. The production was not perfect: the Grand’s small stage was occasionally not just crowded but confused, there were some problems with audibility, some effects were unintentionally comic, there was some obvious overacting, and the interaction between adults-playing-adults and children-playing-adults was inevitably odd - but these were minor flaws. The entire cast and production team are to be congratulated on the amount of work, dedication, and thought they clearly put in to successfully bringing off a production of this scale.

The two main characters, Lyra and Will, were convincing in their three different manifestations, as they grew up – but most praise must go to the youngest pair, played beautifully (clearly and naturally) by Sophie Easterby-Smith and Tom Fisher. Two other particularly impressive performances were the witch Serafina (Lizzie Leech) and the dark and morose angel Balthamos (Ben Vallely). E.L. Rucastle very impressively managed to combine directing the production with playing the major role of the clever and scheming Mrs Coulter. As a group, the large, hungry white bears drew the greatest response from the audience, though the closest moment between cast and audience seemed to be in the ‘Outskirts of the Land of the Dead’ scene, when Lyra and Will meet their own, personified, considerate ‘Deaths’, with whom they are able to negotiate about the time they will be ferried across to the Land of the Dead proper.

Particular praise, though, must go to the daemons, many played by Year 7 students. Each remained in character, according to the animal, bird or reptile they were, all the time they were on stage, and interacted beautifully and non-intrusively - not only with ‘their’ human, but also with each other. This careful choreography was evident too in all the crowd scenes.

Given the prevalence of the cinema/DVD culture, a reason for a school theatre production must be to imaginatively involve fellow students who are in the audience as much as those on stage. Knowing that this complex piece of theatre was being performed by their friends and foes (and teachers) did nothing to stop this happening.

Jane Sunderland
18 May 2006

LINKS

Resource site on His Dark Materials, including a dictionary of terms.

Philip Pullman’s views.

Absolute Astronomy.com - a site which includes details of awards the three books have received, plus a detailed synopsis of the plot:

Lancaster Royal Grammar School

Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School