PAUL PEARCE-COUCH
After the controversy of his Satanic Verses, author Salman Rushdie turned to the safer world of story telling; however his 1990 follow-up novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories is not a light fairy tale but a dark exploration of several problems facing society.
The New Wolsey Senior Youth Theatre has worked with Director Helen Baggett to adapt Rushdie’s work into a piece of physical theatre, with one of the largest casts ever to grace the New Wolsey Studio stage.
What happens when a storyteller and his son lose faith in the power of stories is the catalyst for a wild journey though strange lands and even stranger characters. It’s a tale that is common to many cultures but Rushdie sets his telling in a mythical land where locations are based on letters of the alphabet and many complexities are explained as “PTCTE = processes too complicated to explain”. Can Huron help his father, Rahid, recover his voice and faith in storytelling and in turn help revitalise their city?
There is a wealth of material here for this young company to get their teeth into, a large number of weird and wonderful characters and some purely theatrical moments to revel in. As with any abridged adaptation, it is difficult to know what to cut and what to keep but in just over an hour and a half the company have succeeded in keeping enough of the story to sustain interest. Although using a bare stage and a minimal number of props, the company still manages to convey this fantastic world and create some moments of visual delight.
In a strong ensemble piece like Haroun it is probably unfair to single out individual performances, however Steve Withers in the title role and Chris Yarnell as his story-telling father give strong performances that glue the entire production together. Withers in particular giving a performance of intensity that belies his young years.
Some work on diction for some of the ensemble cast would benefit the production as there is a tendency to rush some of Rushdie’s complex lines, losing the audience on route but this in only a minor criticism in a well conceived production.