© Bill Cooper Green Box 'Black Maria' reviews recent Green Box reviews more Bruce Marriott reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months)

Black Maria is based on a children's book by Dianne Wynne Jones. You get some flavour of it from this reader's 'review' on Amazon: "Somehow I missed out on Dianne Wynne Jones as a child, and only discovered her books because my 12 year old son had exhausted all possible JK Rowling titles and needed something similar - since then we have tracked down every last book she has written. I really enjoy her adult knowingness and the sense of the bizarre but peculiar world which exists beneath the surface of apparent normality. Great Stuff."

In many respects it picks up on traditional fantastical stories, ballet or otherwise - love, lost souls, an evil being and the colour of 'national' group dancing. Plus in this case it's bound together with some occasional dollops of fun and a happy ending with lashings of ice cream for all.

The roots of this production go back a few years and what we saw at the Lillian Baylis was clearly much thought about. The stage is stripped right back to black, and hanging, omnipresent, at the back is a huge screen that effectively takes the place of the set and supports the action below. It's the screen that picks up on the more fantastic and mystical parts of the action, sometimes blurred, strange and stop/go and at other times strictly functional, as in recording a journey in a train. I've never seen video so consistently used in this way and it's a highlight of the approach that I hope is taken forward.

The music sounded mainly synthesizer-based and roams from mystic strings to jaunty airs - straightforward if not particulalry inspiring in its own right. The costumes are everyday (because the plot is 'of now') apart from some wonderful daftness for the Mr and Mrs Urs that form the odd inhabitants of Cranbury-on-Sea - think 'Last of the Summer Wine' caricatures. Susie Crow's choreogaphy animates them to become everybody's worst uncles/aunties you have ever known. Wonderful knockabout stuff amidst the more serious-story telling. The choreography mixes in with the plot but it doesn't feel like a dance-led show so much as a multimedia story-telling. Bringing this all to life are 12 dancer-actors, all young apart from Aunt Maria (the Rothbart of the plot) who is played appropriately by the not_so-young Ruth Posner. Central to the plot Maria's interactions with the young dancers were embarrassingly full of missed cues at first but as the night wore on it all tightened up. However at about 100 minutes, including one 20 minute interval, it felt a bit too long to me.

I don't know the book but got most of the plot, if the tree roots and green box confused me at times. But a young person I met later, who knew the book, thought it vividly brought it all to life. The audience on the night I was there were mainly older rather than younger and they seemed to be enjoying it all, but overall I was struck more by the original attempt to present theatre and I hope the team try the approach on other stories and refine it further. It's the thinking person's kids' show and I guess your response will depend on how much you, and your "little devils", want to think in the theatre.