THE suggestion came as long ago as 2005 when Janys Chambers was playing the long-suffering wife in Damian Cruden’s production of East Is East at York Theatre Royal.
“Janys said she’d written a radio version of My Family And Other Animals, and I said ‘What do you think about doing it as a stage version?’,” Damian says.
“We started talking about getting the rights for the stage, which took a little time because these things do as they’re never as straightforward as you think they will be.”
Janys’s stage adaptation of Gerald Durrell’s novel finally sees the light of day on Tuesday, a few days later than intended after Damian took the decision to postpone the opening from tonight to ensure the technical demands could be met for the second production of the Theatre Royal’s In The Round ensemble season.
“It’s the first time since I’ve been here that I’ve put the opening back, but it has allowed me to structure things differently, rather than doing it at the last minute, which doesn’t save you time,” he says.
Set in Corfu in 1935, Durrell’s story looks back at Gerry’s unconventional upbringing on the sun-soaked island with his eccentric, bohemian family in a landscape rich in natural and cultural life, where his pursuit of exotic animals and reptiles led to his zest for zoology and conservation.
“I think people steer clear of doing the story on stage because of the animals in the title – which we’re representing with puppets and masks – but it’s really a story about his family and about finding a passion that served him for the rest of his life,” says Damian.
“It’s a family that’s eccentric and, knocking about at the end of the British empire, had rather a peculiar relationship with a foreign landscape.
“What the book is about unselfconsciously is that they turn up on the island and have this engagement with Greek culture but they don’t quite fit in. The island and its natural force is more than they can handle and so they have to withdraw to British shores, just like the rest of the empire. That makes it a very gentle, funny end-of-empire story.”
Damian notes how the “interesting” relationship between Greece and Britain prevails. “People go on holiday to a place with a different pace of life that we admire and aspire to, but we still don’t know how to handle the way time ticks by differently in the Mediterranean,” he says.
“In Durrell’s story, he is a boy of ten who is much more open to the island and what it has to offer; the rest of them just try to impose their British sense of order on it.
“In that very British way, they try to sail through a sea of icebergs, and because we’re British, we won’t get sunk. Why not? Well, just because!”
To tell this story of bygone days requires assorted storytelling techniques: masks, puppets and music composed by Christopher Madin. “But what we’ve also managed to do is keep the tone of the book, just how dryly the older Gerald looks back at his childhood,” says Damian.
“Janys keeps the wry, pithy qualities of the adult storytelling, which is the voice that’s lost in the film and in the television version.”
• My Family And Other Animals will run at York Theatre Royal from June 7 to June 25. For tickets, phone 01904 623568 or visit yorktheatreroyal.co.uk
• THE task of creating the animal puppets for My Family And Other Animals has gone to freelance prop maker Beckie May.
Once part of the resident team at York Theatre Royal, she now works from home in Scarborough. “It’s easier for me to be freelance, now I have a little boy, Jacob, who tests all the props for me,” she says.
“I do a lot of my prop making at night in my garage, where I do my messy stuff, or in the front room for my sewing and fabric work.”
If you saw Jack And The Beanstalk at Christmas, the meerkat puppet that so entertained dame Berwick Kaler and the audience alike was made by Beckie. Now she is making such puppets as three owls, a tiny puppy, three bigger dogs, two baby magpies, a seagull, a tortoise and rose beetles that that fly around on piano wire.
“They’re generally on a scale that’s a little bigger than in reality,” says Beckie. “I’m working to design ideas that the set designer, Jane Linz Roberts, has come up with. She wanted the puppets to be simplified and stylised, rather than feathered and fluffy, which is harder to do, and then you have to tie all the images together to fit in with the masks the actors are using.”
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