THE West End comes to the Grand Opera House, and no, it is not a sparkly musical.

Instead, retaining the cast from the Phoenix Theatre, Angus Jackson’s touring production is the highest-quality drama you could wish to see this year in York.

See it you should, be it families, war veterans, evacuees, school parties, or devotees of Michelle Magorian’s source novel or even if you remember John Thaw in the screen version.

Or, preferably don’t recall Thaw’s much loved turn or the musical that amazingly didn’t feature Sammy the dog. Start anew with this Chichester Festival Theatre production, which has three immediate plus points.

David Wood, the go-to writer for children’s theatre shows, has created a beautifully observed, moving, humorous and uplifting script that will draw in children and adults alike to this Second World War story of an abused, bullied, bruised London boy, William Beech (Arthur Gledhill-Franks), an evacuee who slowly comes out of his shell under the care and tutelage of village elder Tom Oakley.

Secondly, veteran actor Oliver Ford Davies gives the kind of lead performance as Oakley that, aside from King Lear, Prospero or Tennessee Williams’s Big Daddy, so seldom takes centre stage.

He is playing a gravel-voiced Dorset curmudgeon who “shut down” emotionally when his wife Rachel died from scarlatina, taking his artist wife, new child and the light from his life.

Outwardly a curmudgeon he may be, but caring for William unlocks a heart and kindness that only Sammy, the play’s canine scene-stealer, has experienced. Sammy is the aforementioned third plus point. He is a puppet, a sheepdog orchestrated brilliantly by Elisa de Grey, who voices and moves the dog and although constantly present is somehow invisible too. What a joint performance!

Wood is such an astute, assured playwright and Jackson such an empathetic and intuitive director that potentially difficult issues are handled sensitively yet with a sense of fear too, be it the first sight of William’s bruises; his cowering from a belt; or his enforced return from the country to his God-fearing, hypocritical, cruel mother (Aoife McMahon) in London.

Set and costume designer Robert Innes Hopkins, lighting designer Tim Mitchell and sound designer Gregory Clarke all play their part. 1939 Dorset, denoted by a giant Great Western Railways poster, is a golden idyll, nevertheless stalked by the war; London is dark, dangerous and Mrs Beech’s dingy flat is even more so.

This crushing, stymied, brutal place is introduced at the outset of the second half by the opening-up of the stage like a drawbridge that reveals the hell inside. This is design matching a child’s desperate state at its very best.

So much impresses in these two hours, from the nostalgic waft of songs of the period, to Osmund Bullock’s kindly, heavy-smoking doctor, to Wood’s skill at balancing the grave, the tragic, the redemptive and the English-humoured.

Amid all this are the outstanding performances of the children (including locals), led by Gledhill-Franks, breaking your heart as William, and Joseph Holgate’s exuberant Zach, the theatre-loving Jewish boy with the rainbow jumper and a bright, bold love of life to match.

 

Goodnight Mister Tom, Grand Opera House, York, until Saturday. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or atgtickets.com/york