Malory Towers

Theatre Director Emma Rice is more or less the UK’s only big-name female theatre director, having previously worked with Kneehigh, then at the The Globe in London, and more recently set up her own company, Wise Children. Rice was summarily defenestrated from the Globe after upsetting traditionalists, and this is her first big production since. I hadn’t seen any of her stuff at the Globe, but the last of her productions I saw in Bristol really wasn’t great, so I was a bit nervous as to how this would turn out. Especially as I wasn’t an Enid Blyton fan as a kid. I did however, read plenty of other exampes of the girls' boarding school genre to which Malory Towers belongs.

Malory Towers kicks off in the current day, and I was afraid it would try too hard to be ‘yoof’ but it quickly sent it’s protagonist back in time to Malory Towers, where (I couldn’t quite work out), it was either the 1940s or the ‘20s. It got under steam with a train journey, arrival at the eponymous Malory Towers, and a story about bullying. There was a play within a play, a daring clifftop rescue, a tomboy who loves horses, and a personal disaster. As to the girls, there was the nerdy one, the musical one, and the one that's all Mother I Don’t Like It, Please Don’t Leave Me Here. Not being a Blyton aficianado, I wasn’t sure how many of the books had been mashed into one theatre production, but it worked seamlessly. There was comedy, drama, music, and Much Emotional Learnings All Round. The six female and one ‘gender-nonconforming’ performer were all excellent. I was mildly annoyed by the overuse of projections for scenery, but that’s just me.

All in all, it was an enjoyable production with a great cast and lots of laughs. But that’s on a superficial level. When I tried to prod the entire edifice a bit harder, I became a bit more confused. I figured that Rice had chosen these girls’ stories in order to make a show about female relationships, which are something that theatre would usually run a mile from. So far so good. But then there was the casting of the ‘gender-neutral’ performer, as ‘tomboy’ Bill. Also there was a lot of blah about loyalty to Malory Towers, character-building, etc, which is exactly the kind of thing that expensive private schools go in for. Between all the tiffin and rousing speeches on one hand, and the feministy slant and political-gender-correctness on the other, I wasn’t quite sure where we were; somewhere halfway in a sort of Brexity nostalgia about a lost England, or a brand new world of unsureness and performative correctness all round. Then I thought that maybe that was fair enough, in a way, because that’s where we are, in real life, right now. And I was a bit like, Mother I Don’t Like It, Please Don’t Leave Me Here. But I can’t blame Emma Rice for that, I suppose.

Malory Towers is Wise Children/Bristol Old Vic co-production
Photo by Steve Tanner