Review: Lanny (Bristol Old Vic)

Review by Charles Hubbard

⭐️⭐️⭐️

It’s no surprise that Nancy Medina and the exceptional team at the Bristol Old Vic have clearly pushed all their chips in on this production of Lanny. Based on the recent Max Porter bestseller, soon to be adapted into a film starring Rachel Weisz, and released to catch the perfectly spooky corridor surrounding Halloween season, it’s clear that Medina and co are really putting their best foot forward. So it’s a little strange that the final product often feels a little timid. That’s not to say that Lanny doesn’t boast an exceptional roster of immensely impressive talent - the list of creative and production team members in the program is enough to fill half a phone book, and it’s stacked with heavy hitters. Yet they frequently feel far too chained by a lack of directorial ambition and inventiveness on Medina's part, like children who want to run amuck into the woods yet are constrained by overprotective parents.

Suffering from a sluggish first half and a series of underwritten clichés, this production doesn’t quite know a good thing when it has it, as the few truly bravura sequences here are over far too quickly and replaced instead by repetitively written and blandly staged scenes that feel far too trapped within Porter’s pages. Having not read the book, I cannot speak to its strength as an adaptation; suffice to say that Medina and Bea Roberts (who wrote the adaptation and lyrics for the production) are only able to make a convincing argument that this should be a play in the final 30 minutes. The result is certainly not without merit, and it is commendably nasty (fittingly destined to give at least one child in every audience terrible nightmares), but, like its main protagonist and namesake, the play tends to linger where it shouldn’t.

After his parents move to a remote village outside of Bristol (Roberts transplants the novel’s location from London), imaginative and adventurous 10-year-old Lanny (played on press night by young performer Lucian Thomas, who shares the role with Atlas Johnson-Dutfield) takes solace in the surrounding forest and stories of Dead Papa Toothwort - the local name for the Green Man. While his mother Jolie (an utterly terrific Hanora Kamen) encourages his fascinations and suggests he take informal drawing lessons with reclusive artist Pete (a beautifully sensitive Richard Cant), his father Robert (Raj Bajaj, kneecapped by a painfully one-note role) is suspicious of Pete and increasingly wary of the way his son is allowed to run wild across the countryside. The village’s quiet talk of folklore and the Dead Papa Toothwort slowly infiltrates the minds of Jolie and Robert and leads them to assume the worst about their new community.

While it’s difficult to get into the rest of the story without spoiling where the play goes (though even a child could probably figure out that it’s not going to be all sunshine and rainbows from that description), it’s frustrating and somewhat inexplicable just how long Roberts’ adaptation takes before letting the other shoe drop, both narratively and stylistically. While this slow-burn approach may be carted straight over from Porter’s book, it results in a seemingly endless cul-de-sac of a first act that is crying out to be trimmed down. After an immediately enticing opening sequence involving exquisite shadow play and puppetry, the creative team put their fireworks back in the box for over an hour of flatly staged family drama. It’s never consistently scary enough (though the few moments where the play truly leans into terror are shocking and tremendous), nor really funny enough, with most of the jokes landing with a thud, feeling like duds cut out of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem.

And this lacklustre visual approach is only intensified after the interval, just when I thought things were about to get interesting! Now there’s something to be said for the play putting the audience under the cold light of day after the hammer blow that ends act one, but, for this to have been properly effective, there would have had to be a much larger visual gulf between the two halves to make the police drama really sting. All this to say, when Medina lets her creative team go full folklore phantasmagoria in the final 30 minutes, it is enthralling in a way that almost makes up for the sleepiness of the first two hours. Almost. There is a moment where blue-gelled lighting is raised up on the audience, potentially to hint at our own complicity in the events of the play, that really impressed me with its unflinching boldness. And the way Rebecca Jane Wood’s superlative set continually lifts its different layers before revealing the harsh back wall of the theatre perfectly reflects the way the ugly reality of the village’s psyche is laid bare.

Though if there’s one element here that may make this production worth the price of admission, it’s undoubtedly Kamen’s extraordinary performance. Far from typical onstage depictions of helicopter mothers, Kamen mines the role for a deep well of genuine empathy and sincerity that grounds the play even when things seem to be veering into the fantastical. And her chemistry with Thomas is so natural, you’d be forgiven for thinking they were real-life mother and child (equal credit goes to intimacy director Lex Kaby here). Unfortunately, the writing of her character doesn’t always match the believability of Kamen’s performance. The way her character is perfectly happy to let her only child go running off into the woods with Peter (no matter how innocent the latter may turn out to be) makes zero sense when it is revealed that she suffered from a postpartum belief that Lanny was going to be taken away from her.

There’s plenty of value to be found here - I’m sure many Bristol-based audience members will enjoy the specific references to the city’s geography, even if I found the adaptational change made Robert’s fish-out-of-water, big-city attitude strain credibility when he wasn’t coming straight from the UK’s biggest city. And the few moments that use Wood’s more eccentric costumes and Izzy Bristow’s shadow puppetry are guaranteed to drop jaws everywhere. But it’s a real shame to see a show with such potential so rarely be given the chance to properly achieve it. Maybe the play needs a slightly smaller venue (and a lot less riding on it) to be allowed to take the kinds of risks it truly needs to soar.

Lanny plays at Bristol Old Vic until 7th November. Tickets from https://bristololdvic.org.uk/whats-on/lanny 

Photos by Helen Murray