Review: Instead of a ‘War Horse,’ This Time a Lost Cat Opens a Child’s Eyes

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/21/theater/946-the-amazing-story-of-adolphus-tips-review.html

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In a village on the English Channel, Lily has lost her cat. When the friendly Blues Man calls down to her from the bandstand in the sky, he’s only trying to cheer her up.

“Would you like us to sing you a song?” he asks, mistaking her pigtails and Mary Janes for evidence of sweetness.

“If I wanted a song, I would ask you for a song,” she says with a flash of beastly bossiness just shocking enough to be advantageous to a 12-year-old girl in 1940s England.

But no one — not even the delightfully unconstrained Lily, a tiny creature who does a mean air kick — is going to stop the music or dancing in the larkish and mournful love letter to the past that is “946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips,” directed by Emma Rice for the British company Kneehigh, at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Wafting from that bandstand, sometimes to shoo away sadness but just as often to let it in, the period and original tunes are as artfully layered as the bright set (by Lez Brotherston), which radiates like a plaything supersized.

Adapted by the children’s author Michael Morpurgo (“War Horse”) and Ms. Rice (“Brief Encounter”) from his book of the same title, the show entwines the tale of Lily and her cat, Tips, with the true story of a tragically bungled World War II military training exercise on the channel. Undertaken by the Americans as a rehearsal for D-Day, the operation left 946 soldiers and sailors dead. (St. Ann’s recommends the show for grown-ups and “brave children” ages 10 and up, which sounds about right.)

When we first meet Lily (Katy Owen), the Americans haven’t arrived in Slapton, where she lives with her grandfather (Mike Shepherd), her mother (Kyla Goodey) and the affectionate, strong-minded Tips (a puppet mostly operated by Nandi Bhebhe), who has a penchant for galloping off.

The only real outsider in Lily’s homogeneous Devon village is her teacher, Madame Bounine (Emma Darlow), a Jewish exile from France. Then some evacuee children arrive from “the city,” and Lily makes a new friend, Barry (Adam Sopp). His father died at Dunkirk, but she is merciless to him, anyway, which he seems to enjoy. Lily’s own father is off in the desert, fighting. She tries not to think about it.

The day a couple of American G.I.s, Adi (Ncuti Gatwa) and Harry (Ms. Bhebhe), pop into the classroom to ask for directions, the students shrink at the sight of them — and not because of their uniforms or American accents, but because the children have never seen a black person. (Adi and Harry, members of the segregated military of a segregated nation, are unsurprised.) Lily instantly develops a tiny crush on Adi.

Loads of puppets (by Lyndie Wright and her daughter, Sarah Wright) and Ms. Rice’s customary practice of putting instruments in the hands of her excellent actors lend a pleasing whimsy to “946,” a show that embraces immigrants, friendly outsiders and the need for stalwart allies in a hostile world. It is surprisingly comforting right now to encounter in a British play these two American soldiers, helpful good guys who come bearing Hershey’s bars.

Unlike Joey, the farm horse purchased into army service and taken from the boy who loves him in Mr. Morpurgo’s World War I book “War Horse,” which was adapted into a puppet-driven global stage hit, Tips is separated from Lily only by chance. While she makes a daring effort to find Tips, she mostly counts on her American friends, who promise to keep looking when she can’t.

The action takes a turn toward the somber at the end of Act I, when the village is converted into a war zone, and the residents are sent elsewhere. This is when Tips is inadvertently left behind. As intermission ends, the band plays “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” signaling sadness and loss to come. (Unlike the fans of England’s national rugby team, this show comprehends the song’s spiritual origins.)

Ms. Rice does not shy from the grimness of the military disaster. Staged with smoke and fire in tubs of water at the front of the stage, it is horribly moving.

Yet in the show’s most demonstrative emotional moment, shortly afterward, Ms. Rice and Mr. Morpurgo are heavy-handed just when they should be restrained, using a character to make points about civil rights and dignity in dialogue that sounds forced. (They do this earlier, too, when Lily, semiconscious, thinks Adi is her father. “Can’t you tell a black face from a white face no more?” he asks. As lovely an actor as Mr. Gatwa is, he can’t save that line.)

Those are the only times, though, that this fine production loses its poise. The rest of it is all about balance: of mirth and sorrow, of fear and determination. Suffering is rarely far removed from celebration.

At the top of the show, the friendly Blues Man (Akpore Uzoh) asks his band, for Lily’s benefit, to tell him the question Bertolt Brecht posed — in a poem, as it happened, when Brecht was in exile. “In the dark times, will there be singing?” the musicians reply, paraphrasing slightly.

Yes, there will be, the Blues Man says. And so there is.