Inkheart (HOME, Manchester)

Inkheart belongs on the page. It’s a book about books; a story about the way stories come to life when read. For its full effect, Cornelia Funke‘s story wants reading. It needs to live in the mind, so that its fantastical world feels as vivid and real as the reader’s own – perhaps even more so.

There’s nothing to stop a stage adaptation getting close to that, tapping into the so-called magic of theatre, but Walter Meierjohann‘s staging doesn’t. It recounts the story – and Funke’s is absolutely gorgeous – but never really brings it alive; certainly, never makes it sing. It’s always somewhat banal: adults pretending, not playing make-believe; a blank black stage, not an empty space in which anything’s possible.

Funke’s novel centres on a tender father-daughter relationship, a family with a hole in the middle. When Meggie (a spirited Katherine Carlton) and her dad Mo (Paul McEwan) read aloud, they make characters materialise for real. It’s what happened with Mo’s favourite book, Inkheart: its villains leapt off the page and into the world, ready to wreak actual havoc. The magic works both ways though, and Meggie’s mum went from fact to fiction. She’s been trapped in the book ever since.

At heart, Inkheart captures what it is to read: not just the magic transition from words to imagination, but the totemic quality that books have as objects, the way they’re so much more than paper and ink. "Books are heavy," Meggie observes, "because they have entire worlds inside them." Her dad explains how "memories cling to the printed page;" that the experience of reading is as key as the story being read.

A mound of books dominates the stage. What a pity the celebrated objects turn out to be fake. Meggie’s curled up in a crook reading, when she spots a stranger staring in: Andrew Sheridan‘s smoky-eyed Dustfinger. He has a warning for Mo: Capricorn (Will Irvine) and his two heavies are on their trail. Basta and Flatnose – one a tattooed hulk; the other, a faceful of stitches – become a pantoesque pair, as Darryl Clarke and Griffin Stevens dish out cartoon violence, egged on by the audience. Their escape takes in a Borgesian library and a delirious writer (Kern Falconer), buried beneath a mound of paper.

Sharkey and Meierjohann try to draw out the storytelling with a narrator (Kelly Hotten), but onstage it just slows the story down, while Jim Dawson‘s video locations rob us the chance to imagine the world for ourselves. Too often, Inkheart trips into cliché. You know Capricorn’s evil, for instance, because he wears black and eats chicken drumsticks with his fingers. Ooooh.

Meierjohann’s production is static too, reliant on cheap tricks, cartoon violence and chocolate. Hydraulics lift the books to little effect, revealing a lair billowing with stage smoke, and Sheridan juggles fire like a man terrified of setting light to a child in row three – which, in fairness, he probably is. Oh well, you wouldn’t get that from the book.

Inkheart runs at HOME in Manchester until 9th January.