Tag: Richard G Jones

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REVIEW: Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, Keighley & Worth Valley Railway and York Theatre Royal present The Railway Children, Oxenhope Station *****

Farah Ashraf’s Roberta in the Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture revival of York Theatre Royal’s The Railway Children at Oxenhope Station. Picture: James Glossop

FULL steam ahead for The Railway Children becomes even fuller steam ahead as E Nesbit’s story returns to the railway line where Lionel Jeffries’s charming 1970 film was filmed, Jenny Agutter’s red petticoat, Bernard Cribiins’s bluster et al.

This re-sparking of York Theatre Royal’s Best Entertainment Olivier Award award winner for Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture becomes even more resonant in highlighting Nesbit’s call for tolerance, integration, safe sanctuary and understanding of “otherness”, in our overheated age of Reform, rejection, division and more overt racism. It reemphasises how Bradford has always been a beacon for multiculturalism, a cornerstone of this year’s festival.

In 2008, in the audacious apex achievement of Damian Cruden’s 22 years as York Theatre Royal artistic director, he teamed up with prolific York playwright Mike Kenny to transform the National Railway Museum freight depot into a tented traverse theatre in the heart of York, the most-storied railway city in the north.

The Railway Children felt right at home there, so much so that it booked a return ticket in 2009. Now, The Railway Children has “come home” to the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway (when Jeffries transferred Nesbit’s rural location from Kent to Oakworth station up north in an inspired move).

Excited City of Culture and Worth Valley volunteers are omnipresent as audience members board the steam train – eight carriages long – at Keighley Station to travel the line’s full money’s worth to Oxenhope Station, to the accompaniment of Stand & Be Counted Theatre’s immersive scene-setting soundtrack on the themes of exile, sanctuary, compassion and kindness.

Stalls are selling beer, pies, railway and E Nesbit & Co merchandise, all part of the 2025 event theatre experience, if you wish, and a large poster is advertising  this winter’s “tale by rail”  production of  The Christmas Carol (Haworth Railway Station, tickets www.kwvr.co.uk).

A sign denotes Oxenhope stands 600ft above sea level – York is only 49ft by comparison – and Tuesday’s audience  is already on a high, its mood best captured by Cruden’s dandy pink linen suit, as we enter the Engine Shed, denuded of its locomotives since work began on site in May.

Normally functioning as the “Exhibition  Shed”, home to the highly recommended autumn beer festival, it has been temporarily renamed the Auditorium (rather less evocative than the Signal Box Theatre at the NRM), as the 500 seats fill either side of a track, divided into Platform One and Platform Two.

The air is filled with the chatter and clatter of the railways: station announcements, the porter’s whistle, engines pumping and Yorkshire bird song, the herald to the brilliant sound design engineered by Craig Vear throughout.

Cruden has got all the old band back together: same director, writer, set and costume designer, Joanna Scotcher, lighting designer, Richard G Jones, composer, Christopher Madin, and sound designer, Vear. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, unlike Peter’s model train that needs soldering.

Oxenhope has become Oakworth station, where Scotcher’s design is a work of wonder suffused with a nostalgic Edwardian beauty: a wooden station bridge at one end, the station porter’s office at the other. On the track run wooden pulleys on wheels, pushed along the line by stage hands in railway staff attire to facilitate scenes being played out at various points to ensure everyone has a close-up. Her period costumes are a delight too, from top hat to coat tail, school cap to immaculate suits and the prettiest of dresses.

Jones’s lighting, whether for moorland sunlight, midnight gloom or a murky tunnel, complements every dramatic mood, twist and turn, evoking soot and fresh air alike. Look out especially for the flickering of lights as the rattling sound of  a train thunders by, doing the loco-motion in dazzling style. All the while, Madin’s score could not be more evocative.

In Kenny’s adaptation, the adult “Railway children” look back at their childhood Yorkshire re-location from London, seamlessly morphing into the childhood selves, Farah Ashraf’s concerned Bobby, Raj Digva’s ripping Peter and Jessica Kaur’s puppy-enthusiastic Phyllis.

Equally seamless is Kenny’s nod to Bradford UK City of Culture.  Father (Paul Hawkyard) married Mother (Asha Kingsley) while working in India, then brought his young South Asian family to London, doubling up on their “otherness” when Mother brings her children to Yorkshire in 1905 after Father’s mysterious arrest. 

Kingsley’s Mother stands out with her Indian accent; the children with their refined London airs that can find them putting their foot in it, but always unintentionally.

In a later change, Kenny has transformed Hawkyard’s Russian refugee, the great writer Shepansky, into a Ukrainian Russian: a topical and impactful decision typical of his playwriting prowess.

Dramatic set-pieces, humour, tragedy and triumph combine with the searing social politics in Kenny’s script, the humour exemplified in Graeme Hawley’s portrayal of station porter Mr Perks, sometimes prickly, certainly as punctual as he is punctilious, but avuncular too, topped off by the famous birthday-present scene that moves you to tears.

From the three leads, with their combination of playfulness, squabbling and knowing adult reflection, to Kingsley’s burdened Mother; Moray Treadwell’s grand Old Gentleman to the young people’s ensemble; the multitude of multi-purpose battered suitcases to the delayed-for-maximum-impact of the locomotive, Cruden’s return to The Railway Children is a triumph. Whisper it quietly in York, but bouncing back in Bradford UK City of Culture,  it may be the best production yet.

The Railway Children, Keighley Station and Oxenhope Station, West Yorkshire, on track until September 7. Box office: https://bradford2025.co.uk/event/the-railway-children/.

By Charles Hutchinson 

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REVIEW: Kevin Clifton’s ‘dream role’ in Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom The Musical, at Grand Opera House, York ****

Kevin Clifton’s Scott Hastings and Faye Brookes’s Fran in Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom The Musical

Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom The Musical plays Grand Opera House, York, until Saturday, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm, Wednesday and Saturday. Box office: atgtickets.com/york. Also Leeds Grand Theatre, July 3 to 8, 7.30pm and 2.30pm Wednesday and Saturday matinees. Box office: 0113 243 0808 or leedsheritagetheatres.com.

NOT to be confused with the glitterball dazzle of the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing, the 2023 tour of Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom nevertheless has Strictly royalty at its core, like writing running through a stick of rock.

Australian-born judge Craig Revel Horwood both directs Luhrmann and Craig Pearce’s musical and reactivates his Aussie roots for the voiceover introduction, delivered with camp exaggeration and frank humour.

2018 Strictly champ Kevin Clifton is “thrilled to finally be fulfilling a lifelong ambition to play Scott Hastings”, donning the golden matador-dandy jacket for the ten-month tour.

“When I was ten years old, I first watched the movie that would become my favourite film of all time. This is my dream role,” he enthused – and boy, does it show in his every move, back leading the cast after missing a couple of shows with a foot injury.

We knew he could dance, not only from his seven seasons in Strictly, but when blazing a trail across the Grand Opera House stage in Burn The Floor. Should you have seen him in Dirty Dancing The Musical in London, or on tour as Cosmo Brown in Singin’ In The Rain, Stacee Jaxx in Rock Of Ages or The Artillery Man in The War Of The Worlds, you will know he can sing too.

Now comes a corking Aussie accent as Kevin from Grimsby becomes Scott Hastings, the ballroom wild card from a dance family (like Clifton himself), who falls foul of the Australian Federation with his radical, rebellious moves.

The Open champion-in-waiting instead finds himself dancing with Fran (Faye Brookes, so pink and perky and perfect in her previous York visit in Legally Blonde The Musical). At the outset, Fran is handier with the cleaning regime than as a Bambi novice on the dancefloor, but she is plucky beneath the reserved, bespectacled surface, and step by step, the unlikely pair inspire each other to defy both family expectation and ballroom convention, casting specs and fear alike aside.

Set in 1990, Luhrmann’s funny yet furious, glitzy but gritty, sometimes silly and often highly camp work is a gorgeous romantic comedy, Cinderella tale and rebel with a cause story rolled into a dance drama of the kind beloved by  Bollywood. In Revel Horwood’s hands it revels in that campery, being fruitier than Drew McOnie’s 2016 British premiere at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, putting you as much in mind of The Rocky Horror Show or Rock Of Ages.

Clifton’s Scott is on the edge, his dancing so electric, to the point where if you touched him you would receive a shock, such is his frustration with the strictures of his obsessive mother Shirley (Nikki Belsher).

A grotesque diva of a ballroom teacher with a shark’s smile, her ruthlessness has shrunk husband Doug (a rather too young-looking James McHugh on press night, understudying Mark Sangster) to taciturn timidity.

Amid the battle of Hastings, rule-breaker Scott is also determined to defy the bent judging of Barry Fife (Benjamin Harrold, understudying Gary Davis as more of a reprobate young spiv than a seedy old stickler).

Scott must follow his heart, answer to his true calling and find true love. Out of the shadows steps Coronation Street star and Dancing On Ice runner-up Brookes’s Fran in a typically terrific demonstration of her triple threat skills as singer, dancer and actor. Her duet of Beautiful Surprise with Clifton is a second-half high point.

Shirley and Barry are not their only barriers, so too are Danielle Cato’s aptly named dancer Tina Sparkle and, at first, Fran’s protective Hispanic dad, Rico (Stylianos Thomadakis, the best of the first-night understudies, again for an older-looking Jose Agudo).

From disdain to guiding light, he shows Scott how the paso doble should be danced, leading into a wonderful, pedal-to-the-floor ensemble finale to the first half. This turns into the show’s best routine, shot through with machismo but leavened by humour and ultimately glee, under the spell of Revel Horwood and Jason Gilkison’s witty, swish, elegant, sleek and fun choreography.

As with fellow very Australian musical movie The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert, Strictly Ballroom is rampantly ripe to bear full fruit on the musical theatre stage.

It does so by bolstering the film’s hit songs, such as Time After Time, a swoon of an Hispanic take on Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps by Karen Mann’s Abuela, and the climactic Love Is In The Air, with new musical numbers by David Foster, Sia Furler, Mozzela Neff-U, Linda Thompson and Luhrmann himself.

Mark Walters, best remembered in York for his set on the tracks for Berwick Kaler’s Dick Whittington (And His Meerkat) at the National Railway Museum in 2015, excels here too, both in set design and costumes.

Beautifully lit by fellow York Theatre Royal alumnus Richard G Jones, the domed set evokes the glamour of the ballroom dancefloor, while the clever insertion of boards that pull out enables swift changes of scene to bars, homes and a dance studio.

Barry Fife’s boudoir cameos are an amusing pop-up too and a screen backdrop is put to good use in depicting Australian skies, townscapes and landscapes.

In a week shadowed by the death of Australia’s greatest comic export, Barry Humphries, whose The Man Behind The Mask tour opened at this very theatre last April, Luhrmann and Revel Horwood combine to put an Aussie smile on the face once more with razzle dazzle aplenty, aided by Clifton and Brookes, as lovable as Fred and Ginger.