Little Women is at this point a well-loved, well-worn and frequently adapted novel which will be familiar to audiences of most ages, perhaps mainly from two film adaptations: Gillian Armstrong’s Winona Ryder-starring 1994 version and Greta Gerwig’s lauded 2019 production. Anne-Marie Casey’s stage adaptation has been through a couple of versions and errs towards familiarity rather than reinvention.
The focus of the story is the March family, and specifically the four sisters: Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth. All are in their teens or thereabouts when we first encounter them, and each has their own particular identity that we watch develop. The book, while perhaps schematic in this respect, is nonetheless astute on the ways families define themselves: how siblings might seek to find their ‘thing’, for want of ending up in another’s shadow.
More than this, it is a moving tale about sisterly bonds through times of both personal and national upset. The patriarch (who does not appear in this adaptation) is away, supporting the war effort in the American Civil War. The mother, Marmee (Kate Hampson), is left to raise these four herself and to set an example of charity and forbearance, for instance offering food and care to neighbours in distress.
Freya Parks plays the Alcott stand-in character Jo, an imaginative, passionate young woman who prefers boisterous play and dreams up exotic tales for her sisters to explore, longing for the life of a writer. Ainy Medina is Meg, Laura Soper is Beth and Helen Chong is Amy, and all four have a nice bond, singing beautifully accompanied by Soper’s skilful piano, which adds a great deal to Tom Attwood’s sound design.
The March girls meet their charming neighbour Laurie (Nikhil Singh Rai) and his tutor John Brooke (Jack Aston, also doubling effectively as Professor Bhaer in the second half). The cast is rounded out by Caroline Gruber as the fearsome Aunt March.
This is an oddly hybrid production, inheriting not only the script but also the set of a recent Pitlochry Festival Theatre production, but directed afresh by York Theatre Royal’s Creative Director Juliet Forster. Whether an issue of set or direction, the staging ends up feeling two-dimensional and at times too wide for the space of the Theatre Royal. The piano and Christmas tree, central elements of the first act, are all but invisible to a portion of the audience. The line of trees which are the central conceit of the set design lack real purpose or aesthetic coherence (Alcott’s, and Little Women’s, deep connection to nature and spirituality is minimally explored elsewhere in the production). Moreover, they hem the actors into flat-line patterns which reduce the dynamics available to the staging.
I left unconvinced of the adaptation the theatre has chosen to take on—or perhaps its treatment here—and unmoved by the production. It compresses the action into a series of familiar quotations and moments from the book rather than fully embracing the opportunities of a theatrical imagining and showing us these emerging relationships over the passing of the years. Events segue at such a pace that at times there’s not even enough breathing room for the characters to respond to them, let alone the audience.
As such, scenes such as Jo’s meeting with Laurie tend to be played as though we know already how the relationships will unfold. For instance, while we witness the moment of the two of them dancing together, outsiders at the ball at which they meet, we don’t ever really get to see the spark take hold between them. We just assume there is one and move on to the next plot beat.
So, where Gerwig’s film walked a skilful line between faithfulness and intervention, this falls firmly into the former camp. Fans of the book will be able to tick through a whistlestop tour of most of the comfortingly familiar story beats. But newcomers might struggle to see the appeal.