Malory Towers
The Passenger Shed
★★★★

EMMA RICE’S second production with her company, Wise Children, is an engaging retelling of Enid Blyton’s post-war, boarding school stories framed by scenes from a contemporary school.

The students are more ethnically, physically and sexually diverse, but not too such an extent that seriously challenges Blyton’s insular world inhabited by a narrow range of representative characters.

Rice set out to present a “happy Lord of the Flies” that not only harks back to the positive social values and changes introduced by Attlee’s post-war Labour government, but creates a world where girls can develop without the pressures of our modern age, based on their own decidedly upbeat moral compass.

Lez Brotherston’s tiered stage with comic-book style projections and Ian Ross’s adaptation of 1940s songs and original compositions create a joyous childhood world where the only adult presence is a projected silhouette and an off stage voice.

The stars of the show were the youthful cast who on the hottest day of the year in the Brunel’s beautiful, but unventilated former railway station, managed to generate a high-energy series of typical period adventures as the pupils excitedly arrive at their Cornish, cliff-top boarding school and face the challenges of their new world.

The realities of the outside world occasionally intrude as background to the girls’ personalities, problems or reasons for being there are brought into play, but the essence of this drama is the sheltered world of Malory Towers where the girls have only their own sense of innate justice, fairness and compassion to shape their existences.

This is a beautifully performed and lively, family musical whose period setting and buffered Blytonesque world might negate some of its relevance, but does not invalidate its refreshing message of female decency where girls are allowed to learn to be women “that the world can lean on!”

Runs until August 18, box-office bristololdvic.org.uk