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Justin Fletcher aka Mr Tumble will play Mr Perks Aug 31-Nov 19.
Mike Kenny’s hit stage adaptation chugs into a new station at King’s Cross with all its charm and energy intact. E Nesbit’s book-turned-cult movie about three exceptionally well-mannered Edwardian children is essentially ‘Brief Encounter’ for families. But this lively live version is more than just a ticket for the nostalgia express.
Admittedly, the 60-tonne star of the show is a very real museum piece, the big, brassy William Adams Express Passenger Engine No 563. But the human cast is jolly decent too: Jeremy Swift (aka Maggie Smith’s butler in ‘Downton’) brings comedy and gravitas to Mr Perks, the stationmaster who befriends the three children (nicely played by grown-ups) when they move up to Yorkshire after their father is wrongly imprisoned.
The stage show is livelier and less exquisitely poignant than the movie: steam locomotive nerds may get misty eyed, but anyone who has the words ‘daddy, my daddy’ monogrammed onto their tear-stained pocket handkerchief may be disappointed. That’s largely a good thing in this kiddie-packed temporary theatre, erected over railway track that will shortly make way for Google’s London headquarters. Small viewers appreciate the thrilling and clever staging, which hoots, chuffs out smoke, and sends the railway children racing all over a set built on platforms either side of the track.
The show has lost some of its pace since first outing, but it’s quality entertainment: so well-made that it might have been built in the same Nine Elms locomotive works as the Adams Express. There’s a feeling of muck and brass to the live event, and the Yorkshire characters are stronger and less forelock-tugging than in the movie. Nesbit herself was a bohemian socialist and it’s refreshing that this stage version of her classic story, despite its obvious middle class family appeal, is not too nostalgic for a time when ‘ordinary’ families had butlers, and there was a place for everyone and everyone was kept firmly in their place.