THE LOVELY BONES AT THE ARTS THEATRE
Catrin Aaron and Jack Sandle as the grieving parents
The Lovely Bones should not have been such a shock. It has busted box office takings and paperback sales for decades. The usually sceptical New York Times, greeted the publication of the original novel by Alice Sebold in 2002 with stunned rapture for its ‘audacity and daring,’ a’ high-wire act’ for a first novelist. The book went on to be translated into 45 languages and almost immediately broke the 5 million barrier in weeks. Lovely Bones shattered all publishing records.It even outsold the epic American masterpiece ‘Gone with the Wind’.
Yet from the first lines the story is gruesome and tragic in equal parts. A girl of 14 - Susie Salmon – is raped and murdered on stage . The play follows her attempt to guide her grieving family to the killer. It emerges that Mr.Harvey the perpetrator, is a mass child murderer and Susie is joined in Heaven by a collection of much younger little girls, all victims of his sadistic crusade.
I must have been the only person in the audience who had no knowledge of this publishing sensation, its Oscar-winning film adaptation by Peter Jackson or the play conjured for the stage by theatre impresario Bryony Lavery.
Which is just as well as I would never have gone near the production had I known what was in store. In an early scene the investigative policeman lets the family know that ‘body parts’ have been discovered. The sassy older sister demands to know which body parts and orders a bucket to be brought to her as she knows she is going to vomit. Perhaps I am of an especially nervous disposition, but I immediately felt sick .This was a theatre first for me. Yet the horrors of the murder and the grief of the family are cleverly counterweighted by the determined attitude of the dead Susie as she sets out to help her bewildered parents find her killer – and track down clues to her missing remains. The normality of the all-American life lived in contrast to the quiet of Heaven somehow allows the audience to step away from reality as Susie grows in acceptance over the years and her loved ones work out ways of living alongside the tragedy of her death. The sleuth element helps distract from the sheer pathos . Mr Harvey goes missing after a gallant raid on his ghastly basement from Lindsay the elder sister - he eventually meet a sudden deserved end, but not before he has dispatched a young waitress in a distant town to join his cohort of victims.
An enormous mirror hangs over the stage so we see two perspectives of every scene, and highlights Susie’s movement between earth and the afterlife. Snatches of family life ‘below’ are cleverly produced and ‘Heaven’ has a cast member doubling as the family dog, and then as the many dogs that entertain Susie there. And there is terrific 70s music from The Carpenters, Roxy Music, finally we hear the exuberant “Welcome to your Life’. It all combines to present a heartfelt backdrop to the everyday world of the sleuthing survivors as they press on through their careers - and love -lives -observed by an increasingly accepting Susie.
But it is the energetic performances which allow the mental space needed for this drama to work without overwhelming its audience with the horror of its subject matter. Charlotte Beaumont as Susie is stunning and keeps up her adolescent energy cartwheeling her vigorous way through the action. Samuel Gosrani as the dreamy boyfriend is wonderfully thoughtful and true to his feelings. The parents Catrin Aaron – convincing and heartbreaking in her grief and Jack Sandle are excellent – Jack as the anguished nearly mad father redeemed at the last minute by a heart attack realization of his love for his unfaithful wife. Fanta Barrie as the mutinous older sister has the most tricky of roles and she gives the part an interest and complexity to change her initial sullen defiance into a life-affirming acceptance of her future.
Predictably she marries her courtly beau Sam, a warm-hearted Huw Parmenter the Yankee house improver dreaming of ‘fixingup the place; for them to live’ and the words ‘ they all lived happily every after’ threaten from the wings. The play does not avoid cliché and try as he might Nicholas Khan as Mr Murderous Harvey is stuck with a motiveless malignity, a villain complete with suspicious raincoat. He is an ingenious actor and gives the role as much nuance as his script allows.
The Lovely Bones is rooted in a familiar version of American life with its ‘gifted camps’ for bright children (who knew?) and its flat- footed policemen, its upbeat belief in the ultimate fairness of all things and the resolution of all problems – to include the existence of evil and the inexplicable scourge of suffering of the innocent .
