Review: 'The Box of Delights'

 by James Burkinshaw

Peter (Jack Humphrey), Kay (Callum Balmforth) and Maria (Mae Munuo)

This holiday season, the RSC in Stratford is offering a magical dramatisation of John Masefield's surreal and eerie Christmas novel, The Box of Delights. 

As schoolboy Kay Harker (Callum Balmforth) is returning home to Tatchester for the Christmas holidays, he is accosted on the train (in a scene reminiscent of Emil and the Detectives), by two rather sinister Church of England vicars ("Going home for the holidays, Ha Ha, what?"), who coerce him into playing cards for money. Kay soon realises his pocket has been picked and that the vicars have vanished.  

As he is leaving the train, he he encounters a mysterious Punch and Judy man, Cole Hawlings (Stephen Boxer), who greets Kay with the enigmatic warning "The wolves are running, Master Harker" before entrusting Kay with a small, wooden box. He, too, vanishes.

Stephen Boxer as Cole Hawlings

Soon, Kay is caught up in a bizarre plot by a bunch of gangsters (disguised as vicars), led by evil warlock, Abner Brown (Richard Lynch), desperate to seize the magic box: which gives its owner the power to shrink in size, to fly and to travel through time. In the process, Brown's gang kidnap not only Cole Hawlings, but Kay's guardian, Caroline Louisa, and the entire hierarchy of Tatchester (from the Bishop to the Mayor) in an attempt to prevent the 1,000th Midnight Mass in Tatchester church's history from taking place. To save Christmas, Kay, and his friends the indomitable Maria (Mae Munuo) and nervous Peter (Jack Humphrey), need to make sure the Mass goes ahead and brings light back into the world. To do so, Kay, Maria and Peter have to travel through time and space, in a battle between magic and technology, the mythic and the modern. 

Janet Etuk as Herne the Hunter

In one particularly mystical scene, they meet the ancient pagan god, Herne the Hunter, each child magically transformed into a spirit animal. However, as Maria exclaims, "Christmas ought to be brought up to date. It ought to have gangsters, aeroplanes and a lot of machine guns." First published in 1935,  a few years before the Second World War, Masefield's novel derives much of its eerie charm from the interplay between the snowy, mythic, natural landscape, based on the Herefordshire that Masefield knew so well from his boyhood, and the gun-toting gangsters driving cars that transform into aeroplanes who pursue the children with increasing ruthlessness. 

Like all of the best Christmas stories, there is a darkness to The Box of Delights. Abner Brown consigns several henchmen, from talking Rat (Tom Chapman) to hapless gangster, Joe (Nana Amoo-Gottfried) to a brutal death. And he, himself, meets his match in the form of jewel thief Sylvia Daisy Pouncer (played superbly by Nia Gwynne), who, with her lover Fox-Faced Charles (Tom Kanji) double-crosses Abner in scenes that combine Graham Greene with Ealing Comedy, by turns satirical and sinister. Their protean accents enable Sylvia and Charles to shift fluently from ingratiating vicar to hired thug, from middle-class matron to criminal master-mind in ways that are comic, unsettling and peculiarly English.      

Abner Brown (Richard Lynch) and Sylvia Pouncer (Nia Gwynne)

Adding to the poignancy of the play is the sense it conveys of the precariousness of family. The RSC production introduces the framing device of Kay, in old age, telling the tale of the Box of Delights to his young grandson, who is visiting his grandfather for Christmas following the separation of his parents. Kay himself, is an orphan, his parents having died in a fire, and, as a child, he is cared for by a guardian, Caroline Louisa (Annette McLaughlin), along with two other orphans, Peter and Maria. Jack Humphrey's wonderfully comic portrayal of the timid and rather priggish Peter lends a real pathos to his performance, later in the play, when Peter shows his love for Kay in an act of self-sacrificing courage. 

By turns comic, tragic, satirical and surreal, director Justin Audibert's production of The Box of Delights creates a sense of wonder, not least with Prema Mehta's spectacular use of lighting and Samuel Wyer's magical puppetry (including a memorable Phoenix), that brings John Masefield's novel to life on the stage.