Never Let Me Go at Rose Theatre, Kingston and on tour – review

It’s a challenge to adapt a much-discussed novel for the stage, especially when there’s already an acclaimed film version in circulation, and one thing to be said in favour of this dramatisation of the 2005 Kazuo Ishiguro masterpiece, is that there’s never a moment where you ask yourself why they thought this would make a good play.

With assurance, intelligence and a sure grip on what works onstage, playwright Suzanne Heathcote and director Christopher Haydon give Ishiguro’s thought-provoking, rich but cruel fantasy a riveting theatrical life discrete from the book and the film. Never Let Me Go the play has its own flavour and beats, fully realising the author’s unsettling vision but refracting it through a dynamic theatrical prism.

Set in a recognisable but disconcertingly different alternative version of England in the 1980s and 1990s, one where biological clones are created purely to provide a source of vital human organs for harvestation in the treatment of otherwise fatal illnesses, it’s at once a dystopian memory play, a meditation on what it means to be human… and a haunting love story. It begins with Kathy H (Nell Barlow) caring for a donor (Maximus Evans, appealingly stroppy) who quizzes her on her past at Hailsham, one of the elite breeding grounds for these donors/clones, and it becomes clear that Kathy is only marking time until she too will be called upon to give up her vital organs to save other lives.

Haydon keeps the action fleet and clean as actors burst through the walls of Tom Piper’s suitably clinical set, as figures from Kathy’s memories or present-day medical staff involved in the organ removal. If, with the exception of Barlow, the performances are a little broad when the cast are required to play children, the acting standard goes up several notches as Kathy’s friends move into their late teens and adulthood.

Angus Imrie is thoroughly convincing as Tommy, a young man with whom Kathy has a special bond, prone to fits of uncontrollable anger in an environment where everybody is required to toe the line. Matilda Bailes impresses as his girlfriend, initially projecting a classic ‘mean girl’ persona which later cracks open to reveal intricate layers of hurt and uncertainty beneath the narcissistic spikiness. The conclusion to her tranche of the story is particularly upsetting.

The adaptation uses the neat device, initially jarring but gaining in potency as the evening progresses, of having each sequence conclude with the first line of the following scene, giving a filmic texture to the script and constantly upping the tension.

Also ingenious is how director Haydon and his creative collaborators present the grim story with a troubling, almost sunny, normalcy, at least at first. Joshua Carr’s lighting is particularly effective, bathing the actors in the halcyon glow of remembered childhood then suddenly snapping into the harshness of a Kafka-esque nightmare.

Until Kathy and Tommy dig into the nature of their provenance and the tragic inevitability of the lives mapped out for them, there is a sense that this is the only existence they and their cohorts know, isolated in their Hailsham idyll, presided over by Susan Aderin and Emilie Patry’s sharply delineated guardians. It may be “only” science fiction but the sensitive humanity with which Ishiguro imbues his creations serves as a potent warning about societal tendencies to write off swathes of people as lesser and other, simply because it’s expedient to do so.

Running at a punishing 85 minutes, the first half takes a little too long to establish all this, but it yields satisfying fruit in an emotionally tumultuous second act. I defy anybody to remain unmoved by the sight of Kathy and Tommy clinging to each other, distraught in the knowledge that their lot in life isn’t a happy long term union but a painful stagger towards death as their bodies give up their riches in service of other people with more agency and power.

Holding the entire thing together is a quietly astonishing performance from Barlow as Kathy. With her eager, sad smile and solicitous but hesitant body language, she makes being good and kind into something utterly compelling, which is a pretty hard feat to pull off in the theatre. Barlow conveys the vein of deep-rooted, unchosen melancholy running through this remarkable young woman, and the glimpses of anguish beneath her placid facade are sublimely affecting, as are her brief moments of unbridled joy.

Tragic though the story is, Heathcote lards it with welcome humour, and Haydon’s staging has a bracing energy. All in all, this thoroughly engrossing play is one of the most successful page to stage adaptations in years. Clear, cool, compulsive…and totally devastating.