Review: Coram Boy, York Theatre Royal Youth Theatre, York Theatre Royal (From York Press)

Review: Coram Boy, York Theatre Royal Youth Theatre, York Theatre Royal

10:10am Wednesday 1st September 2010 in Theatre By Charles Hutchinson

THE bar has just been raised again for youth theatre in York by Kate Plumb’s production of Coram Boy. In today’s lead letter in The Press, Simon Sweeney calls it a “triumph of ambition and achievement”, and how right he is.

The show’s run of four performances alas has finished already, and no doubt practicalities of school holidays and the imminent new term prevented the longer run that would have been warranted.

Consider the scale of this show: not since its National Theatre and Broadway premieres has Helen Edmundson’s stage adaptation been presented with a cast of 35 and a 16-strong choir.

What’s more, the young company looked entirely at home on the main-house stage, still configured as a theatre-in-the-round over the stalls seating by designers Catherine Chapman and Lydia Denno, as it was for The Wind In The Willows. Scaffolding from the earlier show was put to effective use as a rostrum for Alexandra McKenzie Wilcox’s Angel, singing excerpts from Handel’s Messiah from on high.

Although written as a children’s book, and duly given a 12-plus age limit by the Theatre Royal, Coram Boy features the burial of murdered babies, a hanging, the first throes of a sexual encounter, and a scene where young mothers raise marionette figures of their babies from graves.

Yet between them, novelist Jamila Gavin, Edmundson and Plumb have judged the balance between sadness, shock, humour and hope superbly in this moving tale of the Coram Hospital for Deserted Children.

Plumb’s casting was crucial too: such experienced hands as John Holt Roberts, as the unbending Sir William Ashbrook, Luke James as the baby trader Otis Gardiner and Eleanor Taylor as his partner-in-crime Mrs Lynch were the ballast for a show where Joe Hopper’s Meshak and Tom Western’s Thomas Ledbury stood out too.