THEATRE NEWS: Railway Children bound for Toronto
26 JAN/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency

All aboard!

Having won the hearts of British critics and audiences alike, the stage adaptation of Edith Nesbit’s THE RAILWAY CHILDREN is preparing to depart London’s Waterloo Station, headed for Toronto, and is due to arrive this spring. Specifically, it is slated to pull into the spanking new Roundhouse Theatre May 8, taking up residence in a purpose-built 20,000 sq. ft. modular tent theatre that, once erected in Roundhouse Park, will seat 1,000.

Presented here by the Touring Consortium (RC) International and Marquis Entertainment, the Mike Kenny adaptation premièred under the direction of Damien Cruden at the National Railway Museum in York in 2009, transferring to the former Eurostar terminal at London’s Waterloo Station in 2010. Staged on platforms that move on railway tracks shared with an actual working period steam train, the production features a cast of 14, bolstered by four rotating teams of ten children each. Casting for the Toronto production is virtually complete, but will be announced at a later date.

Set in the Edwardian era and informed in part by the Dreyfus affair, THE RAILWAY CHILDREN is the story of three children whose father has been unjustly imprisoned, forcing them to leave their comfortable London home and relocate to rural Yorkshire, where their proximity to the railroad tracks leads them into a world of adventure.

British producers Matthew Gale and Jenny King laughingly acknowledge the possibility that more of their audience may be drawn to the show by an intimate knowledge of Thomas the Tank Engine than by any curiosity about the Dreyfus affair, which saw a young French artillery officer wrongly convicted of espionage in a case that smacked of anti-Semitism. But they are confident that this is a show that will have no trouble finding an audience on this side of the Atlantic.

“Trains are very evocative and they have touched everybody’s history”, Gale insists, while King hastens to add: “It’s excellent theatre with no seat more than 20 feet from the stage and it has a huge family appeal.” As for staging the work in a tent, it turns out that their U.K. team, which includes designer Joanna Scotcher, lighting designer Richard G. Jones, composer Chris Madin and sound designer Craig Year, has plenty of experience working under canvas. While they may have been working within the confines of a railway terminal in London, “Effectively, in Waterloo, we had to build a black-out tent within it,” Gale points out.

And while tickets for the Toronto production, which Marquis Entertainment’s Robert Richardson promises will “change the way we look at theatre in Toronto and give us a new perspective on what theatre really means,” will only initially be available through Aug. 7, producers are hoping for a holdover of indeterminate length.

Their new completely insulated tent theatre, they point out, is not only air-conditioned but can be heated as well, and they seem convinced that the locally designed and built structure is capable of withstanding pretty much anything Canadian elements might throw at it. “You (Canadians) are the most experienced in the world at providing all-weather tents,” Gale points out.

The first block of single tickets for THE RAILWAY CHILDREN is slated to go on sale April 4 through TicketKing at 416-872-1212. For further info, please visit railwaychildren.ca.