This adaptation of David Almond’s lauded young adult novel A Song for Ella Grey is, for better and for worse, a story stuck in a moment. Set in ‘the frozen North’, a Tyneside town where the bridges of Newcastle hang in the distance and Bamburgh Beach is within reach, this is a modern retelling of the Orpheus myth from the perspective of a group of mid-teen schoolfriends at a turning point in their young lives, caught in the stasis before a change.
The adaptation, by Zoe Cooper, takes on the novel’s framing perspective, beginning "in the middle of it, when the wheels were already turning". It cleaves close to the progression of that novelistic narrative, and as such we’re in no doubt as to the way the tale will go. We’re told from the outset that there are deaths; that the song for Ella Grey is, in effect, both a siren call and an elegy.
Against an expressionist set of pillowy platforms, duvets and gauze (designed by Verity Quinn), Claire (Olivia Onyehara) speaks directly to us. She has lost her best friend—more, the love of her life—Ella Grey (Grace Long). An unknowable, fluid, offstage figure, Orpheus, has bewitched the group, but Ella most of all. The storytelling is distributed between the five-strong ensemble, with Beth Crame, Amonik Melaco and Jonathan Iceton primarily embodying Claire and Ella’s classmates but also stepping into other roles surrounding the central team.
Onyehara delivers an earnest, impassioned performance which—in part due to the static nature of the situation—becomes slightly trapped in a tone of yearning sadness. Likewise Long as Ella: the character is, in a way, dead already, and calls for a performance that’s a cipher for the youthful love experienced by Claire rather than anything especially dynamic.
But when they pair up through song, and especially Onyehara in a couple of solo moments demonstrating exquisite control, range and beauty, they come to life. I wished for more of this keening, folk-infused live music: Emily Levy’s compositions capture the spirit of the north as well as of something ancient, and the whole cast sing in powerful harmony. Zak Younger Banks, an offstage musical presence, adds a great deal, too.
The pre-recorded elements of the score were, for me, less successful in weaving into the onstage action. On the whole, the sound balance (requiring mic packs for all the performers) felt off at times and distanced the audience from the actors as they fought against an almost-constant wash.
The whole cast forms a strong ensemble, though, and Beth Crame was particularly impressive in the variety of roles she was called upon to personify. The movement sequences, by Ayesha Fazal, add dynamism and emerge in a pleasingly organic fashion from smaller gestures into synchronised moments of canon and mirroring.
The journey into the underworld in the second half is introduced with a slightly half-hearted meta-narrative about enacting these horrors through childhood games. It’s a fine idea but leaves the tone hovering a little, and if anything reduces the stakes further—though in any event, it’s never in doubt how the story will end.
The whole is capably wrangled by director Esther Richardson, with at times impressive and always supportive lighting design by Chris Davey. But for me, it’s an adaptation that probably stays too close to the novelistic structure; it’s atmospheric rather than dramatic. Moments of metaphor, of which a prose page is more forgiving, feel less convincing when squeezed into a couple of lines of dialogue: the insertion of English A-Level discussions about Romantic texts, for instance, or the bundle of facts about the sex lives of sandpipers which handily evoke the relationships we’ve just watched play out.
The atmosphere conjured is, however, one that may ring true for many among the production’s target audience. The show excels at evoking that hiatus moment: the sweet, serious sadness of a last summer as a child. Also, the suspended time of grief. In both of these points of pause, huge feelings, feelings larger than your own body can contain, feel possible. They hurt. And yet it feels impossible to move on, to take them anywhere, nor to live with them.
This is the production’s strength, and no doubt why it might appeal to those finding themselves on the cusp of similar change. It is also its curse, though, and the straightforward translation from novel to stage risks looking and feeling dramatically inert, the cast caught in a single note of high emotion; the story, from its very first moments, already told.