Writer: Kenneth Grahame
Adapter: George Attwell Gerhards
Director: Lucy Bird
It has to count as bad luck when a company, performing open air their last date of a tour of England, lands on one of the few wet days of a more than unusually dry spell. The predominantly adult audience also posed a different challenge from the children they are accustomed to.
No matter: Paperback Theatre cleaned the seats in the garden At the Mill, set out cushions and towels and were rewarded by an audience that responded when needed and lasted 100% to the end despite the return of the rain halfway through.
Birmingham-based Paperback Theatre is a recent addition to the country’s theatre companies and, like an increasing number, is made up mainly of the young. What the audience saw at Stillington were four remarkably likeable young people taking, very engagingly, one each of the four key roles in The Wind in the Willows and, apart from that, singing, playing the kazoo, taking miscellaneous parts as a policeman, a judge, the jailer’s daughter, a washerwoman, a barge woman – and a horse! Not to mention the creatures of the Wild Wood, reduced to glove puppets!
George Attwell Gerhards’ script stuck close to the original, though obviously truncated. He began by actually using the original as narration and throughout it was never far away. His modernisations sometimes struck home wittily, sometimes seemed to be dragged in, but the spirit of The Wind in the Willows survived intact.
Lucy Bird’s direction, one imagines, took different forms at different places on tour. Here it involved lots of racing round and lots of audience engagement! Bird herself appeared as a bossy Badger as well as a horse (with her own coconut shells) and various figures in uniform. Charis McRoberts was a delightfully wide-eyed Mole and formed a double act with Carys Jones, a sweetly good-natured Brummy Rat, in court and in the prison, both showing their versatility and switching accents merrily – what have Bird and Gerhards got against the Welsh? Even Toad, bumptious as ever in Nathan Blyth’s personification, got in on the act.
When one thinks about the performance, one keeps coming back to the word “likeable”. It would have been good to see it with a largely juvenile audience – one imagines that the interplay would have been fun. As it is, both the company and the venue are to be marked down for the future. This was part of the Stilly Fringe, an inaugural fortnight of new work At the Mill, performed in the garden with – shall we say? – partial shelter, which we hope will return next year and again include Paperback Theatre – and no rain!
Reviewed on 30th July 2022.
