British Youth Music Theatre – Terra Nova

Terra Nova, performed by the British Youth Music Theatre, was reviewed at the Theatre Royal Winchester.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

One of the great things about British Youth Music Theatre – and there are many – is that it splendidly ventures on the road.

Apart from a Covid intermission, it has been roaring along since the 1970s, often making gifted young aspirants into grown-up talents with a cracking career ahead.

Plymouth is a favourite haunt; so is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe; previously Aberdeen; and Belfast especially – witness the touching Paperboy (2018), set in bomb-battered Northern Ireland. Leeds, Huddersfield and Halifax; Taunton and Exeter; Ipswich and Norwich. Or Chetham’s in Manchester, whose (classical music) supremacy they might dream of rivalling. If British Youth Music Theatre hasn’t visited somewhere yet, it’s probably plotting to.

Its wide repertoire includes a great deal of new work (including commissions). And plenty of classics: Macbeth (punchy, updated production); A Winter’s Tale (with acclaimed music by Howard Goodall); Children of the New Forest; Gulliver’s Travels; and historic Theatre Royal Margate, with The Night the War Ended. Great ideas, great delivery.

Another Theatre Royal is Winchester’s. In 2017 BYMT gave Winchester Thomas Hardy’s grim tale of the ill-fated Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Their Frankenstein exposed a desperate journey in the frozen far north. This time it’s south: Captain Scott’s fateful second attempt (1910-13), via his ship Terra Nova, to reach the heart of Antarctica, during which the party of five men perished (out of a crew of 34, exactly the cast number here).

A challenge for any ensemble to chew over. Rachel Birch-Lawson’s script and direction married with choreographer Khyle Eccles. Critics have applauded her “visceral, striking, evocative, radical physical style”.

It certainly energises the current BYMT team. The partnership suggests both strength and weakness. The dance, the blocking and the movement are indeed athletic; beautifully rehearsed; periodically near-perfect. The massed young performers give their all: much potential talent.

But Terra Nova is a ghastly tale of terrible tragedy – witness the harrowing John Mills film (1948), with icy music by Vaughan Williams. True, snow floats down here like rose petals (more sweet sprinkle than blizzard). The show’s comely, effortful, expressive, elegant, enticing youngsters evince a lot of beauty, and indeed joyous aplomb. The doomed fivesome are differentiated, authentically, by warming, beige-brown Burberry attire. One fated trio is vocally a treat.

Lights (Danny Vavrečka) are largely inspired. (Yi Wen Lim) is credited as associate designer. Snippets of the music (not all) are bangy, underscoring the dreadfulness. The keyboards (composer and musical director Adam Gerber, Jamie Stephenson-Glynn) supporting able strings frequently hit the jackpot.

There is one especially distinctive girl soloist, with impressive low as well as high register. Indeed most of this buoyant gang sing lucidly and appealingly. Some choreography, even if a fraction repetitive, really works, delighting the eye; indeed eye-attracting, skilfully engineered mobile blockings excel.

But one struggles to grasp how far this bold Dance Connection undertaking captures the expedition’s ghastly last struggle in March 1912. Yes, they shiver. Yes, it evokes some kind of ordeal. But a hit or a miss? The Terra Nova expedition represents a horrific, prolonged death-knell. To risk a ropy pun, bits of this narrowly miss the boat.

Roderic Dunnett