I’d be less than surprised if displayed somewhere in Sally Cookson’s study was the rubric, ‘Anything film can do I can do better with just imagination and people’.  Ms. Cookson, with her accustomed imagination and gravity defying puissance has again exercised her ability to give the inner an outward reality.

The devised piece is a co-production between the Old Vic in London and its Bristol sibling that has in its diary a breathing space after the Bristol run which allows for potential changes prior to the London debut. Thus, one supposes, is the nature of devised theatre (circumventing the dramaturgical input of Adam Peck) that it can renew itself as inspiration calls.

The current production is the third iteration (fourth if one includes the film) of a story which was originally outlined by Siobhan Dowd prior to her untimely death then brought to fruition by Patrick Ness in his award winning book. Now, with a few ropes and some theatrical magic one of the most distressing of life’s scenarios is offered up on our stage.

The plot is simple enough: a schoolboy is trying to come to terms with the imminent death from cancer of his mother. His psychological turmoil bodies forth the Monster in the form of a tree which comes at the same hour of the night on four occasions; at each of the first three to tell an allegorical story. The first (as I understood it) about our need, on occasion, to lie to ourselves, the second about the healing potential of belief and the third about the destructive power of the monsters we create of ourselves by a self-imposed exile from the world. The fourth story is one the Monster demands of Connor, on pain of death, and involves his attempt to rescue his mother from the edge of a cliff.

The mother, played by Marianne Oldham with an emotional tread of surgical delicacy, whilst trying to re-stitch the unravelling seam of life is also trying to plan for Connor’s future. His father having remarried and moved to America she arranges for Connor to live with his emotionally clumsy yet caring grandmother (Selina Cadell)

If mythology had delivered us of a ‘Father Nature’, terrible yet benign, Stuart Goodwin’s Monster would be its embodiment. Both tormentor and refuge, an admixture of the pagan and the classical, his athletic and dependable presence is all that absentee father, Dad (Felix Hayes) is not. The Monster is also by way of being Connor’s confessor as he struggles with guilt over wishing for the inevitable as a way of stopping both the pain of his mother and his own psychological distress.

Mathew Tennyson as Connor gives a performance of great insight as he shows us a boy on the edge of nervous hysteria who is nevertheless able to make that essential wrench of ‘letting go’ and so transition back to a condition of mental health and maturity.

Music from Cookson stalwarts, the Bower brothers is no mere gilding, but one of the carotid arteries through which the (at times explosive) emotion flows.

The first half felt a little episodic as a rather obstreperous schoolboy railed against the seemingly inevitable. Yet in the second half the emotional weight of the play begins its pull and a structure emerges with, on the one side, the mother not wishing to relinquish her hold on life whilst on the other Connor is fantasising the opposite and being wracked with guilt for doing so.

The company is talented, the direction fluid and sensitive and the theme is universal.  Everything this director does speaks of hope for the theatre and the transcendent power of the imagination.   ★★★★★   Graham Wyles   8^th June 2018