REVIEW: Malory Towers from Emma Rice Company – Brighton Festival
Artistic supremo Emma Rice and Emma Rice Company returns to Brighton Festival with a joyful, chaotic and surprisingly moving theatrical adaptation of Malory Towers, a revival of the company’s 2019 show that transforms the world of midnight feasts, lacrosse matches and boarding school rivalries into a richly theatrical celebration of female friendship, growing up and self-discovery.
A year on from this company’s (then called Wise Children) dazzling Hitchcock-inspired energy of North by Northwest in the same venue of Theatre Royal Brighton, Rice once again demonstrates her gift for blending comedy, music, visual invention and emotional depth, this time turning to the windswept Cornish clifftops and dormitories of famed post-war author Enid Blyton’s beloved school stories. If last year’s musical and comic iteration of North by Northwest felt slick, cinematic and knowingly glamorous, Malory Towers is looser, warmer and more emotionally rooted: An anarchic theatrical fever dream built out of school trunks, ghost stories, terrible puns, adolescent melodrama and the strange, incomprehensible intensity of young female friendships.
It should not work nearly as well as it does. On paper, adapting Blyton’s boarding school books for a contemporary audience feels risky. The stories are deeply tied to a particular vision of English girlhood encompassing midnight feasts, jolly hockey sticks energy, strict discipline, dormitory politics and moral lessons wrapped in post-war optimism. It would have been easy either to mock that world or to present it with suffocating nostalgia. Director and adaptor Rice wisely does neither.
Instead, the production approaches the material with affection, intelligence and just enough irreverence. Beginning in the present day before whisking audiences back to 1947, the story follows protagonist Darrell Rivers as she arrives in deepest Penzance, to a new boarding school determined to mould girls into admirable young women in the uncertain years following the Second World War. Darrell arrives impulsive, hot-headed and emotionally raw, quickly finding herself navigating friendships, rivalries and the complicated social hierarchies of school life.
At the centre of it all is the tension between conformity and self-expression. This musical may promise discipline and respectability, but Rice’s production delights in the girls’ unruly inner lives: their jealousy, longing, competitiveness, loyalty, theatricality and occasional cruelty. These girls are not presented as quaint caricatures from children’s fiction but as emotionally complex young people with deep and strange feelings, trying to work out who they are.
Much of the production’s emotional core comes through the friendships themselves. Darrell’s evolving relationships with shy Sally, dramatic Alicia, and perpetually infuriating Gwendoline are handled with warmth and humour, while the arrival of the rebellious horse-loving Bill adds a welcome sense of freedom and possibility. Gwendoline in particular emerges as more than simply comic relief. Beneath the vanity and melodrama sits loneliness and insecurity, the tendrils of the Second World War overhanging young people, and the production allows space for that complexity without becoming heavy-handed.
Rice has always excelled at ensemble storytelling, and the young cast here is astonishingly versatile. Actors switch effortlessly between scenes, instruments, songs, accents and comic set-pieces with seemingly inexhaustible energy. Live music runs throughout the production, weaving together original songs and familiar tunes in ways that feel playful rather than forced. The piano on stage is used throughout with beautiful and poignant music created by Ian Ross, Composer. Choreography by Alistair David supports the continued nightly tumult across the stage, with Dream Sequence creations in the form of creatives Beth Carter and Stuart Mitchell. The cast sing beautifully, sometimes in multiple languages, creating moments that are by turns comic, melancholic and exuberant.
The strength of the production lies not only in Emma Rice’s inventive direction but in the charisma and versatility of its young cast. Robyn Sinclair brings warmth and emotional credibility to Darrell Rivers, capturing both her fiery impulsiveness and growing self-awareness, while Molly Cheesley’s Alicia Johns delivers sharp comic timing and irrepressible energy. Bethany Wooding gives Sally Hope a quiet emotional intelligence that grounds many of the production’s more chaotic moments, and Rebecca Collingwood is wonderfully infuriating as the vain and melodramatic Gwendoline Lacey, balancing comedy with flashes of vulnerability beneath the character’s bravado. Eden Barrie’s earnest Mary Lou Atkinson and Stephanie Hockley’s eccentric, music-obsessed Irene DuPont add further texture and humour, while Zoe West’s rebellious Bill Robinson radiates freedom, confidence and mischief.
Music remains central throughout, with musician and understudy Emily Panes helping to sustain the production’s lively, constantly shifting atmosphere. Together, the ensemble embodies Rice’s trademark style: actor-musicians capable of moving seamlessly between comedy, movement, storytelling and song with infectious energy and precision.
The production revels in theatrical invention. Puppetry, animation, projected imagery, mixed media, physical comedy, and inventive sound design collide with audience interaction and moments of outright silliness. There are knowingly terrible jokes that somehow become funny precisely because they are so awful. There are sudden unexpected bursts of Shakespeare. There are gothic ghost-story moments that veer from hilarious to genuinely unsettling. At one point, the production seems to tumble willingly into chaos before pulling itself elegantly back together again. This is very recognisably Emma Rice’s theatrical language, and it is notable that this is a creative director at the top of her game, playful, excessive, self-aware and emotionally sincere all at once.
The design embraces that spirit beautifully. The permanent tiered set allows scenes to flow rapidly between dormitories, classrooms, clifftops and theatrical fantasy. Rather than attempting realism, the production creates a heightened storybook world constantly in motion. Objects become props become instruments become jokes but in a tongue-in-cheek way. The staging often feels gloriously handmade, celebrating the imaginative possibilities of live theatre rather than hiding its mechanics, echoing the rigours of the post war years.
There is also something quietly radical about revisiting stories centred so completely around girls and young women, characterised by a clever and responsible group of actresses. Despite decades of dismissiveness towards ‘girls’ stories’, productions like this remind audiences just how emotionally rich and dramatically fertile those worlds can be. The emotional intensity of female adolescence, the alliances, betrayals, idolisation, competitiveness and longing for belonging, becomes the engine of the entire production.
The audience reflected that enduring affection. The crowd skewed noticeably female, many clearly carrying childhood memories of Blyton’s books with them into the theatre. Yet what was striking was how successfully the production reached beyond pure nostalgia. I attended with a male companion who had little attachment to the original stories. In fact, I wasn’t sure if he would like the show at all, but he very much enjoyed it and who nonetheless emerged thoroughly charmed by the inventiveness and emotional warmth of the production. I felt a warmth at this engagement with the dramatic inner workings of young women that could reach across demographics
That broader appeal comes partly from Rice’s refusal to patronise either the material or the audience. There is nostalgia here, certainly, but it is handled intelligently. The production acknowledges both the comforts and constraints of the period setting. The girls are being trained to become ‘fine women’ in the voice of the unseen headmistress Miss Grayling (voiced by actress Sheila Hancock), yet beneath that expectation simmers rebellion, ambition and individuality. In that sense, the production feels unexpectedly contemporary.
If there is a criticism, it is perhaps that the first half occasionally feels overloaded with ideas. Rice throws so much at the audience, songs, jokes, visual gags, movement, narrative detours and theatrical tricks, that the storytelling can briefly threaten to overwhelm itself. But the second half settles into something richer and more emotionally satisfying, allowing quieter moments of vulnerability and reflection to emerge from beneath the chaos.
