The Railway Children

For a time in the early 2000s (at the point my children were the right age to make use of the fact), Loughborough Town Hall hosted a series of half-term and summer holiday performances for children of a very high quality and well worth the ticket price to go and see.  Which we did, generally – just the three of us, sometimes, but taking their friends along at others, thanks to the handy discounts Charnwood Council’s Wild Card scheme brought with it. 

Brian Patten reading from his ‘Gargling With Jelly’ poetry collection was one performance I remember, stand-up comedian-cum-poet James Cameron another, his catch phrase ‘with fish!’ one we adopted in our family for a while, along with the Monkees parody ‘then I saw that stick, now I’m a retriever!’

One of the plays we saw was an excellent production of The Railway Children and I was keen to see how they’d manage to recreate one of my favourite films on a stage, given the limitations of scene changes and unlikelihood they’d manage an actual steam train as part of the set.  It proved to be very little like the film, of course, more closely resembling the arc of Nesbit’s book. 

But it was a wonderful experience never-the-less, with sing-a-longs taught to us by cast members wearing plus-fours and smock dresses, children from the audience called on stage to overcome a shortfall between actors and minor story-characters and the absence of a real train so not a problem that I can’t recall, now, exactly how they got around it. 

We loved every minute – even my train-loving but fidgety young son sat still long enough to enjoy it, and again, snatches of the play’s songs have worked their way into family vocabulary.  Even now, I’ve only to hear the word ‘perks’ and I break into song about Mr Perk’s birthday and what a jolly nice chap he is.  A classic experience, literally.

AM