Children aren’t happy with nothing to ignore,
And that’s what parents were created for.
– Ogden Nash (1933)
Fiona Hallenan-Barker
5 flying frogs!
Venue: Belvoir
Sydney
Dates: Until September 20th
Belvoir is back in gleeful, unruly form, with Neil Armfield once again raging into the famous corner space.The Book of Everything is a joyful reminder of what this theatre does best: big ideas, big hearts and enormous theatrical imagination in a very small space.
Richard Tulloch’s adaptation of Guus Kuijer’s Dutch children’s novel is everything theatre for young people should be. Funny, moving, visually inventive, inclusive and, crucially, unafraid of the dark.
Kim Carpenter’s set and costume design immediately establishes the world. Childlike without being childish, it makes clever use of every nook and cranny of the Belvoir space. Scale shifts, objects transform and magic happens in every scene. It is low-tech theatre with high-voltage imagination.
Ian Grandage’s music and Steve Francis’s sound design are woven into the production with similar precision. Musician Jack Ward is everywhere without moving from his perch, adding instruments and textures while somehow remaining part of the ensemble. Sound, music, movement and voice become one exuberant theatrical language.
And then there are the actors.
This is an exceptional ensemble of Australian theatre talent: Julie Forsyth, John Gaden, Claire Jones, John Leary, Rebecca Massey, Bridie McKim, Pamela Rabe and Matthew Whittet. There is a wicked pleasure in watching actors of this calibre throw themselves into such playful work. Between Forsyth, Gaden and Rabe alone, there eight Helpmann wins. They know exactly what they are doing, and they look like they are having a ball doing it.
Matthew Whittet gives Thomas an ageless Peter Pan quality. His wide-eyed wonder becomes our way into a world where the logic of adults is often baffling and frightening. John Gaden is terrifying as Thomas’s pious father, then wonderfully absurd as the neighbourhood dog. John Leary is born to play Jesus, delivering one-liners with such honesty that the audience erupts.
But the women are the beating heart of the production.
Claire Jones brings extraordinary delicacy to Thomas’s mother. She must hold the impossible tension between loving her family and managing a violent husband. Jones never pushes the emotion; the restraint makes it more devastating. Pamela Rabe is delicious as Aunty Pie, an independent force of nature, and equally hilarious as the precocious cat living next door to Thomas. Rebecca Massey brings teenage hauteur and strength to Margot and Bridie McKim gives Eliza a lovely mixture of eccentricity and resilience.
Julie Forsyth is luminous as Mrs Van Amersfoort, a woman who has survived unimaginable pain and still manages to find laughter in the everyday. Her scenes with Thomas are the production’s emotional centre. Their connection is tender, funny and quietly profound.
Because beneath all the frogs, guppies, jokes and theatrical trickery, The Book of Everythingis about difficult things.
Death. Cruelty. Antisemitism. Family violence. The damage adults can do to children. The production does not soften these realities for its young audience. Nor does it wallow in them. Instead, it looks at the darkness and asks what else might be possible. It feels particularly prescient.
It is also impossible to ignore the context in which Belvoir is presenting this work. After a brutal year of swift remounts, a devastating warehouse fire and the ongoing financial pressures facing the performing arts nationwide, there is something almost defiant about seeing a production that is this generous and ambitious on the Belvoir stage.
And it is generous. My ten-year-old co-reviewer rated it” at least six times better” than a very large-scale international animal puppetry show also currently playing.
The magic here is not scale. It is the opposite. It is the intimacy of a room full of people imagining the same thing together. Children and adults laugh at the same jokes, gasp at the same surprises and, eventually, reach for the same tissues.
Go. Take the kids. Take your parents. Take yourself on a theatre date. Take some Kleenex. And buy an ice cream at the bar. You may as well embrace the full childhood thrill (but don’t stay in the foyer too long of you will miss the interval action inside the theatre).
The Book of Everything is joyous, fierce and deeply theatrical. It is a celebration of imagination from a company that has had to fight hard to keep making it.
For the young and the young at heart, this is a must see.
Fiona Hallenan-Barker, Theatre Now
