IN Fog And Falling Snow tells "the untold story of York's Railway King" and not before time.

Minskip author and journalist Robert Beaumont, when writing his 2002 biography The Railway King, had commented how the rise and fall of York rail network entrepreneur George Hudson was the stuff of a film. Thirteen years down a different line, York Theatre Royal, Pilot Theatre and the National Railway Museum are on the right tracks in presenting the disgraced Hudson's story on stage, ironically in conditiions the very antithesis of fog and failling snow.

Correction, make that three stages (two NRM halls and the purpose-built 1,000-seat Signal Box Theatre) in another hugely ambitious site-specific project that takes York Theatre Royal and assorted partners beyond St Leonard's Place.

The 2015 York community play, with a cast of 200, follows the similarly epic 2012 York Mystery Play and 2013 street play, Blood + Chocolate and is the first of four Theatre Royal shows in an NRM residency.

The first half introduces Hudson (sole professional actor George Costigan, bushy sideburns, plump padding and all) in conversation with railway engineer George Stevenson (Ian Giles), who has entered the Great Hall aboard The Rocket to the accompaniment of Madeleine Hudson's choir.

Stevenson has a statue; Hudson has only a street name where you can get a curry or catch a bus, bemoans Costigan's rumbunctious Hudson at the outset of Mike Kenny and Bridget Foreman's witty, socially sharp and moving script. A plaque? No. A tea towel?, he asks forlornly?

Audience members are allocated a team guide by colour sticker to follow a series of vignettes in carriages and on engines in the Great Hall and Station Hall, each introducing characters and thickening the Hudson plot: his promised-land issue of shares; his cost-cutting competitive edge; his rivalry with nemesis George Leeman (a dyed-in-the-wool Rory Mulvihill); his relationship with his malapropism-prone wife Elizabeth (a splendid Rosie Rowley); his magnetism for both workers (the hard-up north eastern Jenkins family) and get-rich-quick investors in his steam dream (Jeremy Brown and Kane Hutchinson's Edward and Jimmy Gadd).

These promenade vignettes involve walking aplenty and noise bleeding from other scenes that make vocal clarity difficult amid over-excited shouting, but while not exactly full steam ahead, they do establish the warts-and-all pioneering Hudson and layers of intrigue.

 

York Press:

Paul Osborne as train driver Albert Jenkins and the ensemble cast in In Fog And Falling Snow. Picture: Anthony Robling

 

The reward comes in the second act with the spectacle yet intimacy of Foxton's traverse design with a rail track that enables sets to be pushed into place on flatbeds. Banquets look magnificent; a funeral cortege of multiple umbrellas recalls the 2012 Mystery Plays, and as the Hudson bubble deflates, so his problems become entwined in the ill-fated travails of the outstanding Paul Osborne's fading-sighted train driver Jenkins and daughter George (Charlotte Wood, York's latest young acting flame).

Costigan sets a magnificent lead; Alison Cartledge's costume designs, Dominic Sales's compositions and Hayley Del Harrison's choreography all make an impact, and co-directors Cruden, Juliet Forster and Katie Posner oversee a flamboyant, if overlong production that nevertheless grows better by the scene.

In Fog And Falling Snow, York Theatre Royal, National Railway Museum and Pilot Theatre, at National Railway Museum, York, until July 11. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk