Some big attitudes from the little women

REVIEW: Little Women – Malvern Theatres (Tuesday, April 15 to Saturday, April 19).

Showtime! stars rating: * * * * *

AS has been the fate of so many writers down the ages, Louisa May Alcott had to jump through hoops – no, not her skirt supports, I hasten to add – in order to get published.

The main fly in the literary ointment in this case being the clueless editor at a swanky Boston publishing house, who thought the four girls in the story – Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy – were basically rather dull.

Well, it just goes to show, doesn’t it? Talk about writing beauty being in the eye of the beholder, for anyone who caught this superlative piece of theatre on the first night at Malvern this week would soon have realised that these siblings are anything but boring.

And bearing in mind that a new-fangled thing called a novel was just coming into its own during the mid-19th century, the period in which the story is set, plus the fact that women were blazing the trail, makes such blinkered male opposition back then all the more absurd.

Perhaps to put this in some kind of context, a more modern equivalent would be the Decca recording company’s refusal to sign the Beatles. But thankfully, this editor eventually saw the light and the rest, as they say, is history.

Sympathetically adapted by Anne-Marie Casey, this coming-of-age tale is set in the dark winter of an America being pulled apart by civil war, yet paradoxically it is the springtime of these young girls’ lives.

There are consistently fine performances by an awesomely talented cast, which includes Honeysuckle Weeks as Abigail ‘Marmee’ March, the stern but essentially compassionate matriarch who must somehow cope while her husband is away fighting at the front.

All her daughters are challenging, high-spirited individuals kicking against an era when young women were denied any destiny other than the inevitable marriage and the endless child-bearing that routinely followed.

And while there are indeed men hovering, none of the girls allows herself to be easily trapped into the matrimony that their suitors plainly believe is a given.

Leading the way by a New England mile is the effervescent, would-be novelist Jo March, a truly free spirit played with a tireless sense of purpose by Grace Molony. The character of Jo is clearly autobiographical, hence the power that informs and drives Alcott’s writing.

Nevertheless, the young wannabe author is given a run for her money by the spiteful Amy (Imogen Elliott) who wantonly and cruelly destroys her sister’s unfinished manuscript in a fit of blind jealousy.

Jo’s resulting anguish is painful to watch, the sense of hurt and frustration that her literary hopes have also gone up in flames being quite hard to witness.

Fine performances, too from Meg (Jade Kennedy) and Beth (Catherine Chalk), while the male love interest courtesy of Jack Ashton and Cillian Lenaghan is never found lacking, despite the fickleness of their love interests.

Meanwhile, bringing some calm to this stormy ocean of hormones is the redoubtable Aunt March (Belinda Lang), a textbook maiden lady who periodically scurries across the stage like some crinolined cob spider traversing that living room carpet in autumn.

Here we have plenty of comic asides, which are more than welcome in the highly charged atmosphere of the March household, where the tensions can sometimes be tauter than a fiddle string.

Director Loveday Ingram’s Little Women is a thoughtful commentary on what is probably a timeless subject and is definitely one for your diaries.