YORK Theatre Royal's stage hit The Railway Children is now available on DVD and The Press has five copies to be won, courtesy of Genesius Pictures and Spirit Entertainment.

Filmed by Ross MacGibbon in the purpose-built Signal Box Theatre at the National Railway Museum during the Summer 2015 run, the film was screened to 406 cinemas nationwide on Easter Monday.

Adapted for the stage by York playwright Mike Kenny, Damian Cruden's Olivier Award-winning production already had travelled south to Waterloo Station and King's Cross in London and overseas to Toronto in Canada, and the film screening saw York Theatre Royal joining the likes of New York's Metropolitan Opera and the National Theatre's NT Live programme in taking over a cinema screen.

MacGibbon's work is not a film per se, but a stage-to-screen recording of a performance during the Theatre Royal's residency at the NRM, where he asked the cast to carry on as normal, while his crew's seven cameras navigated Cruden's thrilling and clever staging, which utilised mobile platforms, props and rail carts on tracks and a real steam engine, as featured in Lionel Jeffries' 1970 film. Consequently, the performing style remains theatrical, more heightened and expansive than film acting, with the need to project the voice to 1,000 people divided either side of a rail track.

E Nesbit's The Railway Children follows the story of Roberta (played by Rozzi Nicholson-Lailey), Peter (Izaak Cainer) and Phyllis (Beth Lilly), three children whose lives change dramatically when their Father (Robert Angell) is mysteriously taken away. The children and their now penniless mother (Andrina Carroll) are forced to move from London to a cottage in rural Yorkshire. There they befriend the railway porter, Albert Perks (Martin Barrass), and embark on a magical journey of discovery, friendship and adventure, but the mystery remains: where is Father and is he ever coming back?

Something of the grand scale, in particular the magnificence of the steam locomotive, is lost in the proximity of the filming and so too is a full physical awareness of just how much running Nicholson-Lailey's Roberta, Cainer and Lilly had to do along the long, long platforms.

On the other hand, the close-ups are so beneficial, not least everyone being able to listen in on the conversation between the children's Father and two arresting officers, which previously was out of hearing range for those at the opposite end of the traverse stage.

The performances of Barrass's station porter Albert Perks, Carroll's Mother and Nicholson-Lailey's Roberta, in particular, become even more impressive, even more moving, while Mike Kenny's dialogue benefits from the camera's focus, pointing up his more serious themes, such as displacement and wrongful imprisonment, but aiding the abundant humour as well. The slickness of the staging is very apparent too.

The International Emmy Award-winning MacGibbon had previously filmed stage-to-screen adaptations of Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, Oscar Wilde's The Importance Of Being Earnest with David Suchet and Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure at The Globe Theatre, London. His 109-minute film comes with 25 minutes of special features, entitled Where It All Began/From Stage To Screen.

The Railway Children continues to run at London's King's Cross Theatre, where both Martin Barrass and fellow Theatre Royal pantomime stalwart Suzy Cooper have appeared in the show this year, Barrass reprising Perks and Cooper playing Mother.

Win the DVD

The Press has five DVDs of E Nesbit's The Railway Children (certificate U) to be won, provided by Genesius Pictures and Spirit Entertainment.

Question: Who directed the York Theatre Royal production of The Railway Children?

Send your answer with your name, address and daytime phone number, either on a postcard to Charles Hutchinson, Railway Children Competition, The Press, 76-86 Walmgate, York, YO1 9YN, or by email to charles.hutchinson@nqyne.co.uk, marked Railway Children Competition, by January 3 2017. Usual competition rules apply.