13 hours ago
11
Some characters are too big for the stage. Take John Smythe, the man otherwise known as Daddy in Fiona Mozley’s beguiling novel. By any perspective, not just that of Danny and Cathy, his teenage children, he is a hulk of a figure. He is not only a prize fighter, wiping out opponents in illegal bouts with supernatural ease, but he lives a wild-man existence, prowling society’s edges, off-grid and at one with nature in all its beautiful cruelty.
Faced with giving him theatrical form, writer/director Javaad Alipoor leaves him to our imaginations. Better to suggest his primal power than disappoint us with an all-too-human actor. Instead, Daddy exists in narration and reported speech, never in plain sight. It is a wise move, even if sometimes you hanker for a flesh-and-blood confrontation in a production, for Bradford 2025, that is more descriptive than dramatic.
Upfront about its origins as a novel, the adaptation leans in to the storytelling. In the role of Danny, LJ Parkinson is sometimes a character but more often a narrator, drawing us into this quasi-mythical tale in which the brute force of capitalist greed confronts the lawlessness of a preindustrial economy. Out on the West Riding fringes, landlord Mr Price (Sean Jackson) tries to contain Daddy’s feral family, as if attempting to tame nature itself.
Alipoor frames this story of class, exploitation and misogyny as a tragedy, telling us Daddy’s fate from the start. It is another smart move: the knowledge it will end badly creates a dramatic shape that goes some way to containing the novel’s digressions.
Gaining in polemical force is Cathy’s story. Played by a stony-faced Jennifer Jackson, she steps out of Mozley’s book to claim kinship with a teenage Charlotte Church, a fellow victim of the sexist and sexualised culture on which Cathy takes violent revenge. As womanhood approaches and the predatory Charlie Price (Tom Varey) swoops in, Cathy not only refuses to be defined by male expectations but fights back, disrupting the social order as she goes.
Gloriously taking the place of the novel’s poetry is the live score by Adrian McNally and the Unthanks, their timeless folk melodies evoking the archetypal forces at play in a rich retelling of a haunting book.
