Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford – until 23 November 2019
Reviewed by Antonia Hebbert
4****
Confession: I wasn’t 100 per cent looking forward to seeing this play about a 14-year-old girl who is gruesomely murdered, and then watches and comments as her family and friends struggle with their own lives afterwards. She knows and we know that the murderer lives next door, but she can only watch as the police fail to find the proof, the parents’ marriage is torn apart, and teenagers suffer – but then grow up, which she never can.
Amazingly, it’s enthralling. Or perhaps not completely amazingly, as it’s based on Alice Sebold’s hugely successul novel The Lovely Bones. It has been adapted for the theatre by Bryony Lavery, and the director is Melly Still. The stage is almost bare, except for a square marked out in chalk, but the entire backdrop is a mirror, so that all the action is reflected and seen from a different angle. This is an ingenious way of showing people overlapping in the different dimensions of life and afterlife, and to add to the layering, spotlit actors appear through the reflected layer. Linking the actual and the reflected is a spooky row of crooked, spiky corn plants, reminding us of the cornfield in which the murder took place. In this kind of space the acting doesn’t have to be completely literal, and at moments it feels more like a dance piece, performed with split-second precision.
Charlotte Beaumount is bright and engaging as the ever-young murdered Susie, Fanta Barrie is her sister Lindsey, and the tormented parents are played by Jack Sandle and Catrin Aaron. Nicholas Khan is a convincingly creepy killer Harvey, and Lynda Rooke is fun as a glamorous gran. Other members of the cast provide a fast-moving supporting crowd of friends, family, police and occasionally dogs. As with the book, you don’t exactly get a happy ending, but you do get a sense of renewal and rebuilding – the ‘lovely bones’ are a metaphor for the new strength that the family develops.