946 — The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips at Shakespeare’s Globe, SE1

reviewed for The Times, 19 August 2016

Fans of Michael Morpurgo know the drill. In 946, as in War Horse, the love of an animal helps humans to cope with the horrors of war. In this latest stage adaptation of a Morpurgo novel, we meet the 11-year-old farmgirl Lily and her oft-disappearing cat, Tips.

While her father fights somewhere in an African desert, Lily cautiously befriends a mouthy Blitz evacuee, a Jewish schoolteacher and a jitterbugging pair of African-American GIs in Devon for secretive and dangerous war exercises on the beach at Slapton Sands.

It’s not just Morpurgo who is working a winning formula. Fans of Kneehigh Theatre will also be on familiar territory as the acclaimed Cornish company apply their trademark blend of folk music, puppetry and local sensitivity to illuminate the West Country’s forgotten war history.

This wouldn’t be a Kneehigh show without a fiddle and a few recorders, but the composer Stu Barker also blends in a blues band, snatches of gospel music and some contagious lindy hopping. Perhaps it’s called Kneehigh Theatre because it features the highest knee-kicks I’ve ever seen.

Emma Rice, the former Kneehigh director, is the new head honcho of the Globe and she has exercised the privilege to showcase her work with her old colleagues. It’s a savvy reminder of why her appointment generated so much excitement. Like all Rice’s work, this production is full of boisterous collective energy — and the occasional moments of clodding earnestness.

The racial politics can be clumsy: one black GI, confronting his likely death, reportedly declares it OK to fight a “white man’s war” due to his awkward premonition of the civil rights movement. Lily and her family, however, are Good White People.

And only in an Emma Rice show would a child in 1940s Devon experience mystic encounters with a blues singer who quotes aphorisms from Bertolt Brecht and Maya Angelou. Meanwhile, we’re meant to empathise with the homesick evacuee Barry, but when his much-missed mother turns up to visit, she’s a vulgar, flirtatious parody of womanhood, played by Ewan Wardrop.

Similarly, the septuagenarian version of Lily, subject of an over-complicated framing device, seems to be played by a macho Mike Shepherd for no reason other than that she’s a strong woman.

Yet there’s so much heart here that it feels mean-spirited to quibble. It’s hard to take our eyes off thirtysomething Katy Owen’s lithe, livewire performance as a skittish young Lily.

There’s loss and darkness — especially when the show’s title is explained — but perfectly pitched for a family show. My merry band of junior critics were enthralled while I found myself blinking back tears.