Step into the shoes of Billy Casper.
Home life is bad and school life is worse.
Brother is a bully and mum is a mess.
Pushed around at school, he always gets the blame.
That’s what it’s like to be Billy.
One day, everything changes. Happiness swoops into Billy’s life in the shape of a kestrel. A kestrel called Kes. Kes is Billy’s friend, his best friend, his only friend.
Kes the story of one boy’s heart. How it came to beat and how it came to break.
Suitable for everyone over 10.
Kes is yet another triumph from Catherine Wheels. Proving that theatre for a younger audience needn’t lose any of its strength or impact, their latest production soars with an emotional power which sweeps down and grabs the audience, yet never loses sight of its central themes of hope and salvation.
[Catherine Wheels] are once more showing off their skills in this near perfect new production for older children and adults.
Director Gill Robertson has fashioned a drum-tight 70 minutes of theatre (which is best viewed, I’d say, by children aged 12 and over). Its flawless performances are beautifully facilitated by outstanding choreography by Janice Parker, careful lighting by Jeanine Davies and suitably emotive music by Danny Krass.
Everything, from Karen Tennant’s junkyard of a set, to director Gill Robertson’s sure yet light touch, to Danny Krass’s soaring, lyric music makes this production for the over-10s fly with feeling. Look out for it on tour.
Everything is in place, yet Robertson and Evans have somehow failed to capture the central inevitability of the story itself.
Evans’s version – staged in a searching, elusive style, with beautiful but enigmatic filmed images of woodland and countryside – often seems more like a history lesson in the horrors of 1960’s working-class life and schooling, than a full and balanced evocation of Hines’s story.
Pearson’s rendition of the troubled teenager is poignancy itself, while Murray switches from mum to brother to sports coach to shop keeper as if nothing is outside his range.
Catherine Wheels’ production demonstrated, simply and effectively, how theatre can set a fire in young people’s imaginations. More, please.
The end result is both haunting and moving.
Visually spectacular and emotionally involving, containing some unexpected moments of comedy and enviable physical prowess, the only thing wrong with Robertson’s Kes is that it feels much too short at just one hour long.
Catherine Wheels have created a faithful adaption of Hines’ classic that's an absolute must- see for Kes lovers and the unacquainted alike.
On Tour, from Thursday September 15, 2011, until Wednesday November 2, 2011.