Never Let Me Go is said to be Ishiguro’s best novel, and one that helped clinch the Nobel Prize in Literature. The theatre adaptation at Kingston’s Rose Theatre is closely reminiscent of the novel—a faithful rendition to a narrative that keeps you guessing until the end. But for anyone unfamiliar with the written work, Suzanne Heathcote’s theatre adaptation, which was directed by Christopher Haydon, could be challenging to follow, because in some ways it is too literal.
This is a story about people who are bred for a purpose, a purpose that is deeply unpleasant for them but which is supposed to further the rest of the human race. The production, like the book, starts in the late 1970s and tracks through various decades, with a digital display at the top of the stage intermittently flashing to indicate the era of the narrative, but the signposting overall could have been a little more evident.
The staging and Tom Piper’s set design are very versatile, but an even greater contrast to indicate the various eras wouldn’t have gone amiss. The staging could also have created a greater distinction between the bubble to which the doomed individuals were confined and the reality of the rest of the world that sat within spitting distance of their own and which they could see and feel and hear but which they felt was was inaccessible to them, largely due to their lack of agency.
But this lack of agency does come through in scenes such as when Tommy, played by Angus Imrie, is being prepared for what will be his last operation. In this scene, Joshua Carr’s excellent lighting design comes into its own, and with Eamonn O’Dwyer’s composition of the most chilling music, it conveys the dread the fated patient must have felt. A sense of helplessness is one that Tommy and the others in his group experience throughout their lives, a situation they embraced without question. In this poignant scene, the feeling of foreboding finally peaks when he knows that he’s about to make his last sacrifice, after which there would be no more left to give and life itself was going to drain away from him.
The acting on the whole is faultless, with noteworthy performances by Nell Barlow, who plays the very likeable Kathy H, Matilda Bailes as Ruth and Maximus Evans, who plays Philip. They expertly deliver dialogue that is faithful to the novel, but the novel has the advantage of being an expected length into which the reader knows they’re about to absorb themselves, taking them on a voyage into the reality of the everyday lives of the students at the Hailsham boarding school. The dialogue in the theatre is at times similarly lengthy, but the audience can be less forgiving of situations and conversations that meander on, particularly in what is a long first half.
The concepts within the story that could be more apparent in this theatrical adaptation are the good intentions of the teachers at Hailsham, who attempt to provide the pupils with an education and appreciation for culture that other young people who were not at the boarding school but who were nevertheless part of the programme of donation never enjoyed. And were there any ways out of the contracts the pupils implicitly entered into by being part of Hailsham boarding school? Could the artwork produced by the most talented pupils have proved that they in fact had souls like the normal human beings of which they were clones, thus helping even some of them from their inevitable fate?
Those questions are left hanging, but could perhaps have been explored, along with the debate as to whether the Hailsham teachers—Madame and Miss Lucy placed by Emilie Patry and Miss Emily played by Susan Aderin—were in fact doing their utmost to give the pupils under their charge to live their best lives up until the point of sacrifice. Perhaps comparisons with real life historical situations could have been made in which people were unethically experimented on for the advancement of science: black populations in America in the 1930s to help in the treatment of syphilis, medicines given to women in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to help develop birth control pills and of course the various horrific experiments conducted on Nazi concentration camp inhabitants.
From that narrow point of view, it could be argued that the Hailsham inhabitants enjoyed relatively privileged lives, and issues into which the staging could have delved are left unexplored.