A Warm and Nostalgic Hug of a Play
If you need to cheer up your Spring with something life-affirming, loving, lively and musical, then get along to Theatre by the Lake in Keswick to see their stage adaptation of Flora Thompson’s much-loved memoir Lark Rise to Candleford, playing there until 18 April.
This co-production by the theatre and Newbury’s Watermill Theatre, in association with Hammerpuzzle Theatre Company, is directed by Bryn Holding and has been brilliantly adapted from Thompson’s book by writer-composer Tamsin Kennard.
Lark Rise to Candleford is Flora Thompson’s nostalgic tale of life in the English countryside, as she looks back on her childhood at Juniper Hill – ‘Lark Rise’ – in Oxfordshire, and her move to fulfil her ambitions in the Post Office at Candleford.
The National Theatre staged a production in 1979, but audiences may be more familiar with the 2008-11 TV adaptation, which embellished Thompson’s tale, whereas Tamsin Kennar’s new staging pares it down but also makes more explicit the themes of personal and societal change.
The cast of five brilliant actor-musicians tell the story through the many voices of village and town, along with song, music and dance.
The staging is inventive and the performers astonishing in their ability to do everything at once: dancing while singing and also playing their instruments – not easy with a cello, one suspects!
Laura (Jessica Temple) is ambitious and imaginative and eager for learning. Her mother (Rosalind Steele) doesn’t understand her wayward daughter: “Girls that age should be locked away in a box,” she says in exasperation. The strict school mistress (Rosalind Ford – also postmistress Dorcas Lane) approves of Laura’s desire to read, but not her dreamy imagination. But in Candleford Laura’s horizons soon widen as she sets to work in the Post Office under the expert eye of Dorcas, who exhorts her to ‘wrap every penny stamp with a smile.’
There’s not a single weak link in this cast of multi-instrumental actor-musicians, with Christopher Glover playing Laura’s forbidding father as well as her genial uncle, Alex Wilson her beloved brother Edmund and the Irish labourer at the Post Office, while Laura’s encounter with the awkward young Candleford journalist Godfrey Parish (Zrey Sholapurkar) leads to quite the best bicycle riding you will see on stage!
It’s a moving, reflective but ultimately joyful production celebrating community, family, memory – and the courage of Laura Timmins to shape her own destiny, at a time when that was rarely permitted for women.
Laura’s final monologue on time and memory is a tender, evocative tribute to rural lives in transition: a rhapsody on the demise of Victorian agrarian England, although as Flora Thompson says: “the threads which bound her to her native county were spun of love and kinship and cherished memories.” And those would last forever.
• At Theatre by the Lake, Keswick until 18 April www.theatrebythelake.com/event/lark-rise-to-candleford-keswick-lake-district-theatre/
