By BRUCE DENNILL
The Railway Children / Directed by Alan Swerdlow / National Children’s Theatre, Parktown, Johannesburg
E Nesbit’s 1905 story has endured even as its themes – which involve war, espionage, poverty, family and community – have gone through cycles of relevance, bringing it to now, when everyone in its audience can again relate to at least one aspect of the story.
For this stage adaptation, director Alan Swerdlow has had to compress a story that moves geographically across Greater London and originally includes over 20 characters and a number of separate stories within the overall narrative into a play that fits onto a smallish stage (plus an annex on one side of the theatre, alongside the audience) and has a cast of six. One or two of the adventures from the book have been excised, but what remains still constitutes a solid test of the attention span of the younger members of the crowd (which becomes evident when some of them start to offer some occasionally quite personal stage whisper chirps in the last third of the piece).
That said, the cast, both talented and clearly well-rehearsed, manage the challenges of a multi-faceted script with good humour and smooth transitions. The actors playing the titular children – Kamogelo Nong as Bobbie, ZA Mvubelo as Peter and Kira-Joy Huizies as Phyllis – have lovely chemistry with both the jokiness and the bite of normal siblings, with Huizies’ relish in portraying the bubbly Phyllis’ dark delight with death a regular high point of the production. Winnie-Sue Maboea as the children’s mother is spirited and sensitive; Vitus Dunu as their father, their doctor and Perks, the porter at the railway station near their new home, is equally charming and frustrating (as required by the scene); and Rhofiwa Mundalamo as the Old Gentleman and a Russian dissident (the story has scope!) has a personality that fills the stage.
Clever design of both set and costumes Sarah Roberts means the actors can morph into different characters with the simple addition of a hat or changing of a jacket and, in arguably the play’s most powerful scene, the imposing silhouette of a train steams forward from the back of the stage, adding drama and scale.
The Railway Children is – for children’s theatre – dense and layered, but it is also lovingly crafted and, in its delivery of its positive messages, rather beautiful.
