The Times (30/Oct/2008) - Mary Rose at Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

(c) The Times (30/Oct/2008)

Mary Rose at Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

J. M. Barrie’s Mary Rose is a ghost story. Alfred Hitchcock liked it so much that he commissioned his protégé, Jay Presson Allen, to write a screenplay of it – alas, never produced. He might have liked Kim Gerard in the title role of this production, since she is the kind of pale blonde he could never resist.

I wonder what he would have made of the new ending that the director Tony Cownie has grafted on to it, giving a very different and distinctly macabre slant to the story. Because as well as the supernatural element, this was Barrie revisiting some of the ideas that drive his best-known work, Peter Pan. In this case, it is a little girl who won’t grow up, disappearing to another magical island, first as a child for 20 days and then as a young adult for 25 years.

Barrie’s fascination with the impossibility of maturity is here interwoven with the more general crisis of morale at the end of the First World War. The play was first produced in 1920 when there was a craze for seances and mediums; anything that might enable people to get in touch with those they had lost.

When the ghost of Mary Rose returns to the house in Sussex where she grew up, she is confronted by her own son, just 2 years old when she vanished, now a rawboned, larrikin Australian soldier (nicely caught by Guy Fearon). But because he has grown up and she has not, there is no possibility of reunion, only of release back to the spirit world she has inhabited. In Cownie’s version, let us just say that that release demands a heavy price.

Technically, the production is hard to fault. In a world inured to the wizardry of computer effects, Cownie makes the most of some old-fashioned theatrical tricks, using gauzes, spooky music and effects (Philip Pinsky) and subtle lighting effects (Malcolm Rippeth). The Royal Lyceum’s stage management team should take a bow for some highly disciplined work behind the scenes.

Out front, an experienced cast take care of the non-spooky scenes with a minimum of fuss. Gerard, playing 18 going on 12 in the early scenes, and then stuck in a ghostly half-life, stays just the right side of fey. It is a decent notion to give Barrie’s lyrical stage directions an unseen narrative voice, but it seems odd then to ignore the final one.