Malory Towers
The Passenger Shed
★★★★

EMMA RICE’S second production with her company, Wise Children, is an engaging retelling of Enid Blyton’s post-war, boarding school stories framed by scenes from a contemporary school.

The students are more ethnically, physically and sexually diverse, but not too such an extent that seriously challenges Blyton’s insular world inhabited by a narrow range of representative characters.

Rice set out to present a “happy Lord of the Flies” that not only harks back to the positive social values and changes introduced by Attlee’s post-war Labour government, but creates a world where girls can develop without the pressures of our modern age, based on their own decidedly upbeat moral compass.