| Bridge; Wyndham’s; Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London
The familiar and the fantastic are as one in the Bridge’s Philip Pullman spectacular; more puppet magic powers Life of Pi; and a coolly convincing 70s Measure for Measure Is Bryony Lavery Philip Pullman’s daemon? Her adaptation of La Belle Sauvage goes to the heart of the first volume of Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy and, daemon-like, expresses its essence. Clear and swift, it brings an extra bounce of humour to the tangle of speculation and saltiness that makes the novel at once provoking and compelling. “How do you know about the uncertainty principle?” “I live in a pub.” This is only one of the ways in which Nicholas Hytner’s exciting production (co-directed with Emily Burns and James Cousins) gets things right. Pullman’s novel, set before His Dark Materials, with Lyra as a baby being protected by potboy and potgirl Malcolm and Alice, swims between the familiar and the fantastic: it is a rush of climate catastrophe, adventure, alethiometers, Oxford cityscapes, pubescent stirrings and the repressions imposed by an ironclad Christian regime. Its layers, and its twisting between the antique and the futuristic, are suggested here in Paul Arditti’s delicately thrumming sound design and by Luke Halls’s videos and Jon Clark’s lighting, which swirl over and transform Bob Crowley’s sets: placid-looking woodcut scenery seems to splinter and break apart as a great flood (the Bible is never far from Pullman’s agnostic mind) rushes across the stage. Continue reading... |
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