The Magic Toyshop

Oxford Playhouse.

Shared Experience should have looked to Angela Carter for inspiration long ago. Both are adept at creating magical spaces and at realising incredible flights of fantasy. In The Magic Toyshop the company's considerable creativity has been brought to bear on a story of teenage sexual discovery and the loss of innocence. The result is a hugely imaginative, and visually stunning piece of storytelling.

As the play opens with an ominous thunderclap, we see a girl centre-stage. "The summer she was fifteen," the girl announces, "Melanie discovered she was made of flesh and blood." Melanie's innocent exploration of herself is interrupted when her parents are killed, and she and her younger brother and sister move to London to live with their Uncle Philip, a sadistic toymaker. He lives with his wife Maggie and her two brothers, Finn and Francie.

Soon, the whole house becomes Uncle Philip's puppet theatre. He demands control of everything and strictly dictates the rules of the house. We see the wedding present he bought Maggie - a silver choker that lends her the appearance of one of his automata. Eventually, Uncle Philip stages a show in which Melanie is attacked by a puppet-swan. It highlights her utter subjugation to the desires of both others and herself.

The metaphor is a powerful one, and the presentation of the house and its inhabitants makes it more so. When Finn shows Melanie the puppets, he opens a small box whilst members of the cast perform elsewhere in the space to demonstrate the puppet's action. Maggie and her brothers play music holding their instruments in front of them, moving them as though they are on strings. They dance disjointedly and uncertainly, like street marionettes.

It is only a shame that Bryony Lavery's adaptation of Carter's novel stretches the metaphor to breaking point. "He's pulled our strings," says Finn to Melanie as he rebels against Uncle Philip. He might as well draw us a picture.

The set slopes and tips on three levels, and is flanked by huge curving spars, evoking the bow and stern of a ship. One of these is hung with apples and the other with a garden swing at the beginning of the play. Later, when the set becomes a full-size puppet theatre, this whole ship is rigged in white muslin. An arched ladder fills the back of the stage.

The company make impressive use of this versatile space. The opening tableau, the apple tree silhouetted against a yellow gauze and cut by the arch of the ladder, is an art-deco sunrise over the Garden of Eden. Later, as the cast slide furniture back and forth and fall about the stage as though on a ship in a storm, the entire space becomes something dynamic. The defined shapes in the space help to create beautiful images. Melanie climbing naked through the stark lines and menacing shadows of the apple tree is haunting. Props are used with equal imagination - a chest with a toy telescope on top and a suitcase become a train engine, and a white sheet the billow of smoke as the train pulls away.

Whilst obviously clever and fun to watch, such theatrical games can alienate an audience. It is tribute to the amount of energy Shared Experience invest in their performance that this doesn't happen. Here is a cast committed to the creation of a fantasy, and their enthusiasm is infectious.

Harry Smith 9/10/01