Emma Rice brings Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers to York

After more than 20 years as an actor, director, writer and co-artistic director of innovative Cornish theatre company Kneehigh and a short-lived tenure at the helm of Shakespeare’s Globe in London, Rice set up her own theatre company, Wise Children, last year. Its first production was an adaptation of Angela Carter’s novel Wise Children. The show, a wild, exuberant love letter to showbusiness chronicling the lives and loves of twin chorus girls Nora and Dora Chance over a period of 75 years, premiered at the Old Vic in October 2018 and came to York Theatre Royal in March this year as part of a UK tour. It was, deservedly, a triumph.

The company’s latest production is also inspired by literature, but of a very different kind. Malory Towers is adapted from a series of Enid Blyton children’s books which were published between 1946 and 1951 and set in a boarding school for girls. Rice admits that she didn’t read the stories as a child – “I was more of a Famous Five and Secret Seven fan,” she says – but when a friend (theatre producer David Pugh) suggested a few years ago that she read them with a view to doing a stage adaptation she was impressed. “I thought they were great. The characters are so well drawn and the tales are so brilliant – there is lots of drama and adventure, I thought they were just right for making theatre.”

Currently running at the Passenger Shed in Bristol, Malory Towers has already received rave reviews, and will be heading to York Theatre Royal (the show’s co-producer) next month. “There is a real nostalgia about the stories but it also feels incredibly resonant as an antidote to what is happening at the moment in the sense that it shows how we can be kind and thoughtful and supportive of each other,” says Rice. “The books were written immediately after the Second World War and everybody had been affected by the experience of seeing Fascism in the flesh and the threat of that. I am quite romantic about that time – it was when the NHS was born – and I think there were conscious decisions being made about what kind of country we wanted to be. All that seems to me to be very relevant to today.” Rice has said that she is dedicating the production to the generation of women who were teachers during that postwar period, devoting their lives to the education of girls and encouraging them to become women of substance. This approach is reflected in the storylines of Malory Towers where the focus is on the girls and the kind of women they will become.

“Enid Blyton demands a lot of her characters – they all have to do well, but they don’t show off about it. They are constantly saying they need to be ‘women the world can lean on’. It’s not about being selfish or getting rich, it is about working as a team, respecting difference, and that feels really radical today.”

The girls boarding school setting also means there are no frivolous distractions for the characters (“they never talk about boys, it would pass the Bechdel test many times over,” laughs Rice) and they can get on with their adventures. “In adapting, I chose the most exciting storylines,” says Rice. “So there are plenty of thrills and quite a lot of high jinks. I call it my happy Lord of the Flies.”

York Theatre Royal, September 10-14. Tickets yorktheatreroyal.co.uk