The upstairs theatre at Belvoir Street is normally home to dark, complex, often politically based adult theatre. Company B’s new family friendly production, ‘The Book Of Everything’, presented together with Kim Carpenter’s Theatre Of Image’, makes for a refreshing change. Company B’s outgoing Artistic Director Neil Armfield is currently presenting Richard Tulloch’s adaptation of the Dutch writer Guus Kuijer’s children’s novel.
‘The Book Of Everything’ is troubled, intelligent nine year old Thomas Klopper’s story. The precocious Thomas is an independent thinker and starts keeping a journal, his ‘book of everything’. As the play unfolds we soon work out that the crux of Thomas’s problems lie in his troubled home life. His father is a domineering, authoritative figure who forces his zealous Christian beliefs onto his family. Worse, Thomas and his sister, Margot, often see their parents argue, and sometimes see their father slapping their mother into submission. Until the problems at home are resolved, Thomas’s imaginative and bright spirit will not truly fly.
The renowned Dutch writer’s involving storyline comes alive in Neil Armfield’s artful, warm hearted production. Armfield’s production tackles the play’s challenging themes and still at the same time manages to have a wry, light touch.
Music is an integral part of most Armfield productions and this was very much the case here with musician Iain Grandage accompanying the action, inspiringly playing a way at piano, cello and drums, accompanying the action, on a raised platform far stage right. As well, other members of the cast tinkered away at instruments during the show.
There were some good interactive touches with Julie Forsyth, amongst other actors, handing out tiny green frog balls to kids at interval and directing them to throw them down onto the stage after the break, imitating a biblical like frog invasion! One of the play’s funniest moments was when the Jesus character was helping to sweep the floor after the frog invasion and made the clever pun, Jesus swept!
Armfield wins good performances from a strong cast. Matthew Whittet gives a wistful, moving performance as Thomas. Veteran performers Peter Carroll and Julie Forsyth shine respectively as Thomas’s repressed father and his eccentric, witchy neighbour Mrs Van Amersfoort. Yael Stone was a luminous presence as Thomas’s ‘crush’, a beautiful, mischievous sixteen year old girl with a squeaky leather leg.
The play was brilliantly staged by Kim Carpenter with the lynch-pin of the set being a large book standing at the back centre of the stage. The book featured thick cardboard leaves and as each scene changed a cast member would turn the page revealing the set for the coming scene. Some of the cast would perch on rungs of the tall ladders situated on both wings of the stage when they weren’t part of the onstage action.
‘The Book Of Everything’ plays the upstairs theatre at Belvoir Street until January 31.