Lauren gets a little weepy at this sorrowful, poignant tale of suffering and farewell.
An achingly heart-warming play about sorrow, loss and one little girl’s search for her dead father, Lilly Through the Dark by the wonderful theatre company The River People is astonishingly beautiful, and leaves me with tears rolling down my cheeks. Little Lilly’s difficult journey through the darkest, stagnant depths of the dead land is a tender tangle of myth and fairytale.
The action commences in full macabre glory. On and around a stage composed of a jumbled heap of well-thumbed books and time-weathered sheaves of paper, four resplendently gothic, bedraggled, ashen-faced storytellers, clad in Victorian bustles and top hats, writhe out of the heavy looking manuscript, and set the scene to the wiry echoes of a mandolin.
Soon Lilly emerges, a fragile little puppet whose eyes are bulging with a well of tears. She is so skilfully and delicately manipulated it is almost unbelievably real. We learn that Lilly’s beloved father has not long died, and, grief-stricken, she cannot bear to be without him. One night, afraid and alone, the melancholy Lilly kills herself, and red ribbons trickle from her wrists. Suddenly, Lilly begins to fly through the air, destined for the dead lands. When she arrives she encounters the horrible Rotten Pockets whose job it is to ferry the almost dead down the river to their final resting place. But Lilly isn’t quite ready to get there yet and is desperate to search for her father.
On the boat – wonderfully created by a collection of propped open books and a blue sheet of shimmering fabric pulled to and fro – Lilly thinks she catches a glimpse of someone in the murky waters below, and jumps in. And so begins her escape. Closely followed by Rotten Pockets, Lilly encounters a whole host of weird creatures who could have walked straight off the set of a Tim Burton film. There’s Alice, whose job it is to steal other people's stories, and the evil Willow Tree (an umbrella hung with strips of material) who cruelly snatches the memory of her father’s face from her. A comic interlude is provided courtesy of two puppets hung from gibbets who throw around lines like “Looks like we’ll have to hang about then” and “you kill me, Brian!”.
Lilly finally reaches the moon, who she believes will help restore her to her father. But as she clings on, the moon presents her with a difficult choice. This play is full of sadness but it's also tender and hopeful. The painful decisions Lilly must face are handled with such sensitivity and matched with such beautiful and innovatively handled props (the small beam of a torch, swirled through the air, represents Lilly’s escaping memories of her father) that the whole thing is nothing less than a joy to behold.
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