The Secret Garden – Barn Theatre, Cirencester

Picture: Rosy Webb

The Secret Garden continues at the Barn Theatre, Cirencester until 15 April 2018.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Musicals are often the fall-back option for opening productions at new theatres, but artistic director Iwan Lewis has made an imaginative choice in reworking Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon’s Tony-winning The Secret Garden to launch the 200-seat Barn Theatre in Cirencester.

Lewis, a former actor still in his twenties, wants to see the Barn as a model for non-Arts Council theatre throughout the country, supported with a sense of pride by local communities and a commitment to reviving work.

He sees the original musical adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic tale as somewhat underrated, despite its 1991 success on Broadway, where it ran for 700 performances.

Interestingly, the musical is in line later this year for its first-ever Broadway revival, reimagined by Tony Award-winner Warren Carlyle. “Just remember, Cirencester got there first,” says Lewis.

At the Barn Theatre, experienced West End director Dominic Shaw has aimed at a major repackaging, employing cross-gender casting and the radical use of Elliot Ditton’s puppetry to represent both the living and the dead.

Hodgson Burnett’s central character, 10-year-old Mary Lennox, is the catalyst for her family’s redemption. Orphaned by a cholera epidemic in India, she returns to her recluse uncle’s bleak Yorkshire mansion (shades of Wuthering Heights!) as a haughty, spoiled brat, only to discover a mysterious neglected garden that comes to change both her own life and those around her.

This may sound rather saccharine-heavy and old-fashioned. However, Simon’s lilting music is lent huge energy by a cast of actor-musicians in full-on folk rock mode. By the end the entire audience is on their feet swaying and clapping – and this for a musical that has more than its share of dark moments.

The production benefits from a clutch of powerful singing voices. Daniella Piper, who brings both technical maturity and childlike determination to the main role, is particularly poignant in the ballad ‘The Girl I Mean To Be’ that opens Act II, and there is successful cross-gender casting in Celeste De Veazey playing her crippled cousin Colin.

One of the musical highlights is a moving duet between David Haydn and Minal Patel, as Mary’s recluse uncle Archibald and his brother Neville. They recall Archibald’s late wife Lily, given a haunting presence throughout by American singer Jaimie Pruden, in one of a number of leanings towards the supernatural.

Jenny O’Leary, as Yorkshire maid Martha, the only character likeable right from the start, brings a lighter touch to proceedings in traditional ‘ee by gum’ fashion, and Alex James Ellison’s chipper Dickon has the key role of providing the irrepressible folk band that is at the heart of the contemporary approach.

All this is enhanced by PJ McEvoy and Sam Rowcliffe-Tanner, responsible in turn for the design and lighting of a beautiful series of back-projections bringing out the contrast between bleak house and colourful garden.

John Houseman