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Dominic Cavendish reviews The Secret Garden at the RSC in Stratford-Upon-Avon
Frances Hodgson Burnett started out in the Victorian slums of Salford, then emigrated at the age of 16 with her family to Tennessee. Curiosity, it has taken two Americans, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Marsha Norman and composer Lucy Simon, to recognise that The Secret Garden, one of the novelist's best-loved works, would make a fantastic musical.
Nine years after it stormed Broadway, scooping a Tony Award for best book, their version has undertaken the return transatlantic journey at the behest of RSC supremo Adrian Noble, who gives us a strong contender for Christmas treat of the year.
You would think that this musical would droop towards the sentimental and the saccharine? Ten-year-old Mary Lennox,, orphaned in India and sent to a remote North Yorkshire manor, could easily be a limelight-stealing brat (think Annie!) - first too sour, then too sweet. coming into contact with plain-speaking folk and her counterpart in irascibility, sick cousin Colin, she blossoms amid the high-walled surroundings of her hunchback uncle Archibald's secret garden.
What Norman and Simon have realised is that the book's trajectory from self-centredness to selflessness is not peculiar to the child heroine, but entails a shared experience that cuts across ages. They have widened the focus to include Archibald, unable to stop mourning the death of his wife, Lily, and his doctor brother, Neville, who harboured unrequited love for her.
The repressed English character of the early 20th century - a private hell of secrecy and isolation - is confronted with a sunnier, can-do temperament born of contact with the soil. Simon's music nourishes this healing process: its folky flutings and pounding rhythms evoke primitive rituals, softened by undulating strings. Maudlin solos are woven together into choruses; the voices of the dead mingle with those of the living. Of course, it's wish-fulfilment, but that is what finally gibes the rejuvenatory pulse its heartbreaking quality.
You could quarrel that the horticultural metaphor is overused- there's one too many innocent references to planting seeds and biding your time. Fidgeting may occur during the wet-as-April-showers sequences in which the nature-loving estate hand Dickon warbles on about the coming of spring.
But it's hard to fault a show that has charm in spades and delight by the barrow-load. Gillian Lynne's sure choreographic touch is felt throughout, from the swirling, multi-coloured hive of saris at the start to the boot-slapping leaps and shuffles of the undergardeners and their housemaid partners in the curtain-call reprise.
Even the manor doors have a balletic elegance, spinning magically towards us in a stately threesome. Anthony Ward's design makes the most of the main stage's cramped space: the mazy garden sprawl is succinctly suggested by sliding transparent screens daubed with foliage.
Noble keeps the pace up by using the chorus of house staff to shift furniture on and off almost unnoticed. In vocal terms, the production scintillates: Philip Quast's Archibald and Peter Polycarpou's Neville sound as sturdy as oaks, and Craig Purnell's Dickon has a springy timbre to match his capering.
The piece inevitably stands or falls on the strength of the two children's performances. The parts are being divvied up among a number of young hopefuls, but if they're all anywhere near as good as Natalie Morgan's Mary and Luke Newberry's Colin there will be no disappointments. With hardly a trace of staginess, they show us the highs and the lows of childhood, the liberties taken and freedoms denied. The petticoats and knickerbockers may no longer be in fashion, but the sense of budding possibility hits you like a gust of fresh air scented with moorland.
© Telegraph Group Limited
