Kneehigh, a Cornwall-based theatre company, reinvents musical theater with its latest touring production, 946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips. Based on Michael (“War Horse”) Morpurgo’s young-adult novel of the same name, 946 employs just about every theatrical device imaginable to tell its complex story: drama, comedy, music & song, puppetry and dance. The show also breaks the fourth wall innumerable times, features adults playing children, men playing women (and vice versa), blacks playing whites (vice versa again). All of this is delivered with dazzling energy and high spirits by a 12-person cast backed up by a smokin’-hot jazz band led by a blues man (Akopre Uzoh), who also takes part in the action from time to time.) The free-wheeling, dazzling production was developed over a two-year period by Kneehigh at its home base in the UK. According to its director, Emma Rice, the company worked without a script at first, though it knew what story it wanted to tell. Improvisation, experimentation and free-play were the order of the day, with the words “being fed in bit by bit and the actors learning their lines at the last minute,” she said. “I see the words being the tip of the iceberg, not the iceberg.” The main character is 12-year-old Lily Tregenza (the extraordinary Katy Owen). While her father is off fighting in WW II, Lily is being raised on a seaside farm by her mum (Kyla Goodey) and her grandparents (Chris Jared and Mike Shepherd, the latter in drag). Lili has a cat, Tips, which she adores. The cat (puppeteered by Nandi Bhebhe) goes missing when the war impinges on the bucolic life of the locals. Two American soldiers show up (Bhebhe and Ncuti Gatwa) as part of a battalion training on the Cornwall coast for the eventual D-Day landing in France. The practice session goes disastrously wrong when a communications snafu leads to a surprise attack by a German warship. Bombs fly, men are killed, the farm suffers severe damage — and Lili’s frightened, fiercely independent cat disappears. Death and life, war and peace, love and hate are just some of the verities explored in 946, though it’s fair to say that the main through-line is Lily’s coming of age, a progression which is capped when we meet her as an adult in the climactic moments of the play. In Katy Owen’s hands Lily is at all times vibrantly and gloriously alive, even when she’s being bratty or whiny. Owen also has many touching and gently-comic moments in her awkward romance with Boowie, a 13-year-old boy (Adam Sopp) who has been evacuated from London. Hers is a tour-de-force performance for the ages. Bursting with life and high spirits, mixing reality and fantasy, daring and bold, 946 captivates from start to finish.
