‘We are Malory Towers girls, not ruffians!’ shouts Sally Hope (Bethany Wooding) in Emma Rice’s musical take on Enid Blyton’s classic children’s books. Prior to this production, that line would have summed up Malory Towers as I imagined it. I was a big reader growing up, but not a Blyton girl. A post-war story set at an all-girls boarding school in Cornwall, Malory Towers to me was stuffy and staid.
Yet watching Emma Rice’s musical take on Blyton’s books (first staged in 2019, now playing amongst the faded glamour of Alexandra Palace as part of a UK tour), I found myself utterly caught up in and charmed by this world. I credit this to the hyper-talented cast of actor-musos, who take Rice’s oftentimes simple script and imbue it with life. And yes, there are the obligatory hockey sticks and hijinks – ‘whatever that means’, one character notes, with a wink-like shrug to the audience – but they’re mere accoutrements to the good old fashioned storytelling on display. This is not the Malory Towers I imagined, and all the better for it.
The first rug pull comes in the show’s opening moments. Lez Brotherton’s white textured set, a canvas with the unequivocal trappings of a school, is transformed using projection and lighting. Neon lights flash and pop music plays, as a gaggle of school girls in modern dress sprint onto the stage. These present day scenes unexpectedly bookend the show, and while they’re rushed through at such speed as to leave little room for world building, they provide an effective framing device to get any Blyton-sceptic kids on board.
The scene culminates with school girl Mary-Lou Atkinson (Emily Panes) hitting her head and woozily dreaming that she has gone back in time to the world in her books: Blyton’s Malory Towers. Upon the backdrop, a calendar turns back year by year, to this world. Dressed in maroon wool suits and hats, the girls arrive at Paddington station and are introduced. Each character is still firmly encased in their respective mold at this stage. Alicia Johns (Molly Cheesley) is the joker, Darrel Rivers (Robyn Sinclair) the brave one, Mary-Lou the shy one, Gwendoline Lacey (Anna Soden) the stuck up one. And then there’s the French one, Irene Dupont (Stephanie Hockley), who shows up with the requisite ‘ooh-la-la’s and ‘sacré bleu!’s.
Once they land at Malory Towers these edges begin to blur. No longer archetypes, the characters become nuanced young women with depth reflective of those deliciously messy teenage years. The cast, accomplished and nimble musicians, all play instruments and sing a mixture of original numbers and musical standards, and hum with life as they do so. When she’s not shouting in a cartoonish French accent, Hockley is also the production’s on-stage MD, and makes both roles seem easy.
Malory Towers is a show for families, and must appeal to parents as much as their children. The most obvious recent point of comparison here is the National Theatre’s take on Ballet Shoes; compared to that production, with its richly detailed sets, Rice’s world is a little basic. There’s clever integration of puppetry and playful use of perspective, but the projection work skews pretty simple, and at times borders on the uncanny.
But I’m nitpicking. For grown-ups, Malory Towers is a lively production, driven forwards by an impressive ensemble and sure to prompt a certain borrowed nostalgia for times gone by. Yet I wasn’t really thinking about myself watching Rice’s production; not my current self, at least. Throughout the audience at Alexandra Palace, children (girls, yes, but boys too) sat enraptured. Overhearing excited interval babble as kids compared notes and debated over which of the girls they were most like, I couldn’t help getting a bit teary. Had I seen Malory Towers as a kid, I would have been equally enthralled. For the right audience this is a near-perfect production, and the perfect outing for any child in your life: inner or actual.
