EMMA Rice's Wise Children company and York Theatre Royal are to team up for a second time after the successful launch production of Angela Carter’s Wise Children.

Rice is to adapt and direct Malorie Towers, based on Enid Blyton's novels, in a co-production with the York theatre in association with the Bristol Old Vic.

Billed as "the original ‘Girl Power’ story", the show will visit the Theatre Royal from September 10 to 14 with its "nostalgic, naughty and perfect-for-now" story of Darrell Rivers starting school with an eager mind and fierce heart.

Unfortunately, Darrell also has a quick temper, so can she learn to tolerate the infuriating Gwendoline Lacey or value the kind-hearted Sally Hope? Can she save the school play and rescue terrified Mary Lou from the grip of a raging storm? If she can do these things anywhere, she will do them at Malory Towers!

Building on the momentum of March's two-week run of Carter’s Wise Children, Rice's first production to play York, Emma promises "high jinks, high drama and high spirits, all set to sensational live music and breathtaking animation" in Malory Towers.

"This is a show for girls, boys, and all us grown-up children who still dream of midnight feasts and Cornish clifftops," says Emma, who founded and run the Cornish company Kneehigh for 20 years before her ill-fated tenure as artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe on London from 2016 to 2018. Theatre Royal executive director Tom Bird first worked with her at that time, laying the foundations for the fruitful new partnership.

Rice's new production will open in July at The Passenger Shed in Wise Children’s home city of Bristol in July, then tour to Cambridge, Exeter, Manchester and Oxford as well as York.

"I've always been drawn to the years that followed the Second World War," says 52-year-old Emma. "It’s a time that feels close enough to touch, as I vividly remember my grandparents and how the war affected their lives. My Mum’s parents – poor and largely uneducated – decided that their children would have access to all the things that they hadn’t. I don’t know how they managed it on a railway worker’s pay, but my mother was sent to a remote grammar school in Dorset: Lord Digby’s School for Girls.

"While not a boarding school, Lord Digby's was an extraordinary place of learning that changed my mother’s, and by extension my own, life. The tendrils of passion and education that Lord Digby’s stood for reach out across 60 years and more. They reached out over my inner-city comprehensive education and have shaped my own beliefs and choices to this day."

Rice's adaptation of Malory Towers is dedicated to the generation of women who taught in schools in that period. "With lives shaped by the savagery of two wars, these teachers devoted themselves to the education and nurture of other women," she says. "It is also for the two generations of men that died in those same wars, leaving us with the freedom to lead meaningful, safe and empowered lives.

"And it is for Clement Attlee and his Labour government of 1945 who looked into the face of evil and chose to do what was right. These people changed the political landscape in their focus on care, compassion and the common good.

"Malory Towers was written at the heart of this political revolution, and embodies a kindness, hope and love of life that knocks my socks off. 'Long live our appetites and may our shadows never grow less!’, the girls cry."

Rice's mother wrote to her teachers at Lord Digby’s until they died and is still friends with many of the girls she met there. "When I see my Mum, born into the poorest of rural backgrounds, enjoying Dickens and [Spanish filmmaker Pedro] Almodovar and speaking French to her childhood pen-friend, I am stopped in my tracks. She went on to dedicate her life to the NHS and the helping of others while never losing her appetite for life, culture and hope. I salute her, and I cheer the education that threw this mind and soul into the air and said, 'be a woman that the world can lean on'."

Hence Rice is "making Malory Towers with gratitude, hope and sheer pleasure". "I call it my ‘Happy Lord Of The Flies’ and it is joyfully radical to its bones. Imagine a world where, left to their own devices, people choose kindness. Imagine a world where difference is respected and arguments resolved with thought and care. Imagine a world that chooses community, friendship and fun. Now that’s a world I want to live in and, at Malory Towers, you can," concludes Emma.

The show is licensed by Enid Blyton Entertainment, a division of Hachette Children’s Group, whose head of licensed content, Karen Lawler, says: "Enid Blyton created incredible female characters at Malory Towers: strong, capable and always, always kind. ‘Women the world can lean on,’ in Enid’s own words. We share Emma’s passion for these characters and we couldn’t be more excited to see Emma’s vision of Malory Towers come to life."

Tickets for Wise Children's Malory Towers are on sale on 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk. Watch this space for news of an already confirmed third collaboration between Wise Children and York Theatre Royal next year.

Charles Hutchinson