The Cement Garden

Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden – a disturbing novel about orphaned children left to fend for themselves – is given a nimble if strangely ponderous makeover in David Aula and Jimmy Osborne’s new adaptation.

A teenage boy and his two sisters gambol amid the iron girders above our heads playing doctors and nurses. Precariously perched both physically and mentally, we soon see the two eldest fumbling towards incest. It’s a playful staging that tests the limits of this industrial space. But it’s a cumbersome one too, removing us from the action and creating restricted sightlines. Moreover it’s a marker of a show that spends too much time thinking of clever ways to stage or theatricalise McEwan’s disquieting story instead of just telling it.

Still, if you can look past the plethora of movement sequences, puppetry and athletics, Aula has pulled some beautifully detailed and painfully acute performances from his cast particularly within the central partnership. Ruby Bentall – last seen in Michael Grandage’s Peter and Alice – is a delicate mixture of haughty disdain, lustful longing and gentle concern. As her paramour – and brother – BAFTA Rising Star Award nominee George MacKay is a hotbed of dirty teenage daydreams, father-figure idolisation, stroppy teenager and swooning lover.

Honour Bayes