His Dark Materials

Submitted by on 27 February, 2004 - 12:00

two plays adapted from books by Philip Pullman, and directed by Nicholas Hytner, showing at the National Theatre, London

His Dark Materials is a trilogy of novels. It was considered too complex for adaptation to the stage by some directors. That the National Theatre rose to such a challenge makes you wish them success, especially after they had to face down religious zealots in the teaching profession who denounced the production before it even opened. However, despite some excellent performances, and some truly magical staging and effects, the six-hour epic doesn't quite carry the power of the books.

Much of this is simply a question of scale - there are 100 scenes in the two plays and the action is as fast-paced as it is possible to get on stage, yet fans of the books will still be marking off key items from the books which haven't made it into the production.

Some of the abridgement is a genuine shame, diminishing the rationalist attack of the story on religion and clericalism. The scientist Mary Malone, who counterposes some rational scientific explanations to the mythology of Lyra's world, the Church and the God-destroying knife, is gone, and her role is subsumed into that of Serafina Pekkala, the witch queen. One of the results of the cuts is that the arch-rationalist Lord Asriel is forced to present his case against the Authority (God) in Good-vs-Evil shorthand which makes him appear more like the religious absolutists he so despises.

Pullman's trilogy, which has received critical acclaim and sold massively, has been viewed as a rationalist's response to the Christian allegory of C S Lewis's fantasy series of Narnia books, but its power runs deeper than that. The books describe resourceful young people in a universe where rational thought and scientific discovery are at open war with religion. Despite their openly secular message, the books contain many fantastical characters and locations - the point isn't that spirits and angels cannot exist, only that human beings shouldn't put their fates into the hands of such beings. Pullman makes much use of angels, witches and spectres, but he has no use for God.

That a book, and now a play, that openly denounces the role of God and the Church can command such popular support in a nation riddled with the trappings of religion is undoubtedly a good thing. And I can't wait for the furore when the first school play production of His Dark Materials is presented.

The play also addresses universal themes of the innocence or otherwise of childhood, growing up, loyalty and the drive to inquire, explore and understand that defines us as human beings. That it does so while standing so much Christian teaching firmly on its head also renders it an antidote for much traditional children's drama which equates "morality" with religion and insists on a happy ending for the "good" children.

The acting in the production is superb, but even the powerful performances of Anna Maxwell Martin as Lyra and Dominic Cooper as Will Parry (the central characters in the story) are upstaged by the production effects and, bizarrely, an actor whose face we see in only one scene, and whose main contribution is to wave a puppet around the stage, all but invisible, covered from head to foot in black gauze. Samuel Barnett, who plays Pantalaimon, Lyra's shape-changing daemon - the corporeal representation of her own soul - is excellent in a role that is probably as close as theatre can get to the ground-breaking creation by Andy Serkis of Gollum for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films.

Like Serkis, Barnett provides not only Pantalaimon's voice but also shapes his movement, and invites the audience to believe in the daemon's own identity so convincingly that the strongest scene in the two plays comes when Lyra, seeking to fulfil a promise and visit the Land of the Dead, is forced to leave Pantalaimon behind as she crosses the river that separates the Land of the Dead from the living world. There's hardly a dry eye in the house as Pan paces the riverbank and wails his loss. Who says puppets can only provide light-hearted children's entertainment?

The production is unlikely to tour - the NT's giant revolving drum of a stage, with two giant lifts to raise and lower entire rooms into view, while the outer edge of the stage revolves in the opposite direction to allow one scene to begin almost before the actors from the previous scene have finished speaking, is an integral and essential part of the production.

As the play moves further from a literal rendition of the books, it does seem to find its own voice, and indeed the second play is the stronger of the two, once the rather pointless montage of "reprise" scenes at the beginning is over. Ultimately, the final hour is gripping and taut, and the emotion of the closing decision facing Will and Lyra is convincing and moving.

If Peter Jackson had never made the three films of the Lord of the Rings, this production of His Dark Materials would be worthy of much praise for daring to take on such a massive work at all. But I can't help wishing that the National had followed Jackson's example, and taken the even braver step of presenting the three books as three separate plays. This would have given them a little more time to allow the rationalist, optimistic philosophy behind Pullman's writing to express itself in more than declaimed soundbites and clichés. It also might have left those few theatregoers who hadn't read the books before seeing the plays slightly less bemused. There were one or two shell-shocked faces as we left from seeing part one, and there's very little time to digest the story in between the manic bouts of action and pace in either play.

The first run of the plays is now sold out but they will be re-running at the National Theatre, London from November 2004-April 2005. They are well worth seeing. And the promised film version, for which New Line have already secured the screenwriting services of none other than Tom Stoppard, is also sure to be worth watching - especially if they follow their previous record and commission three films. But the books are already worth even more.

Score: 7/10
Reviewer: Nick Holden

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