An innovative stage version of the classic children's story, The Secret Garden, is now showing at the Helix. Anna Carey hears how the cast interpreted their characters
It's a story that has been loved by children for nearly a century - the story of Mary Lennox, a spoiled, miserable little girl whose parents die in an Indian cholera epidemic and who is sent to live with her uncle in Yorkshire. There, she discovers a walled garden that has been ignored for a decade, and as she brings the garden back to life, she also discovers friendship - with animal-loving Dickon, his sister Martha, and her own troubled cousin, Colin.
Described by a contemporary critic as "a children's Jane Eyre", Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1910 novel The Secret Garden hasn't lost its power to charm.
Hodgson Burnett herself adapted most of her novels for the stage, but not The Secret Garden. Happily, that hasn't stopped director Michael Craven from putting together an innovative new stage version, which incorporates dance and puppetry to stunning effect; moving amid the cast are three dancers who play everything from the cholera that claims the lives of Mary's parents, to some of the animals in the garden.
The central four characters - Mary, Martha, Dickon and Colin - don't have much dancing to do. But the actors who play them face other dramatic challenges. For one, they're not the same age as their characters. In fact, three of them are in their 20s (although it has to be said that they don't look it). So they all faced an acting challenge - how do you play children without being cutesy?
"Michael asked us to not play kids," says Simone Kirby, who plays Martha, a servant girl who befriends Mary. "He didn't want us putting on childish voices or anything like that." Instead, the actors had to carry themselves and simply think like children.
"You have to get into a child's thought process," says Ciaran Fitzgerald, who plays bratty invalid Colin.
Simone agrees. "We just play the characters as they are," she says, "and they're innocent and they're young. And hopefully that comes across."
It's not always easy. "You have to be very careful that you don't patronise the children [ in the audience] says Ailish Symons, who plays Mary. "They know you're not really the same age as them."
But one actor doesn't have to try too hard to capture the age of his character. "I'm playing Dickon, who's a teenager," says Keith Burke. "And I'm 19. So that part of the character isn't too much of a leap." But age wasn't the only challenge faced by the cast. At the beginning of the novel, Mary and Colin aren't exactly sympathetic characters. In fact, in the book Hodgson Burnett herself describes Mary as a "tyrannical and selfish little pig". How, then, can an actor make the audience feel for the character?
"At the start, Mary is a very unlikeable child," says Ailish. "So if the audience hate her at the start, then I'm doing my job. But you see her alone on the stage and it's up to the actor to convey that she's terribly lonely and sad. She's not just a brat. And through characters like Martha and Dickon, she's brought out of herself." None of the cast had read the book before taking on their new roles, although most had seen at least one of the many film and TV versions.
"I saw the [ Maggie Smith] film in school," says Ailish Symons. "It was like a treat at the end of the day - if we were good, we'd get to watch a bit of The Secret Garden." They all picked up the book when they got the parts. "I'm kind of surprised that I hadn't read it before," says Simone. Ailish agrees. "It's a classic, and everyone knows about it, but perhaps it just passes some people by," she says. But has reading the original book constricted their possible interpretation of the characters in the play? It doesn't seem so.
"I think it's important to read the book because it's good to know as much about the character as you possibly can," says Simone. "You don't have to stick to the book, but you can make an educated decision about what you're going to do [with the character]."
And you can even read books about other people's interpretations of the characters. So much a part of popular culture had The Secret Garden become by the late 1940s that Noel Streatfeild, perhaps best known as the author of Ballet Shoes, wrote a wonderful children's book called The Painted Garden, centred around the making of a film version of Hodgson Burnett's book. Streatfeild's heroine is an endearingly cross, plain young girl called Jane, the odd-one-out of her glamorously talented family, who gets the part of Mary more or less by accident. In fact, much as I loved Hodgson Burnett as a child, I always preferred The Painted Garden to The Secret Garden, but I preferred The Little Princess over all of them.
Adaptations of children's literature are big business these days, perhaps because more people are realising that just because a book is written for children doesn't mean it's childish. "There can be many layers in a children's books, like Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy" says Ailish. "You can take so much from it - there's the basic story that can be enjoyed, but the adult will find what they need to get from them, too."
The same can be said for The Secret Garden. At the time of its publication, Frances Hodgson Burnett described it as "an innocent thriller of a novel to which grown-ups listen spellbound, to my keen delight". This new theatrical version should have the same effect - on children and adults alike.
The Secret Garden runs at the Helix, Dublin, until January 8th. Book at www.thehelix.ie or call 01-7007000. See www.farmleigh.ie for details of the extensive pre-Christmas programme there, including food markets, readings and concerts.