Eastern Grace on a Western Stage: Lily’s Poetic Resonance in Angela Fantine Wan’s The Garden

Written by Tom White

In 2025, London welcomed a new musical, The Garden, created by Angela Fantine Wan, offering theatre lovers a deeply evocative reimagining of a timeless story. Adapted from the classic children’s novel The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, the production invites audiences into a poetic landscape where memory, loss, and renewal intertwine.

More than a simple retelling, The Garden becomes a meditation on healing and transformation, tracing how hidden wounds may find expression, and how hope, like a dormant seed, can be awakened through care, time, and love.

As a rising luminary in the world of performing arts, Angela Fantine Wan continually challenges herself, dedicating her craft to bringing classic literary masterpieces vividly to the stage. In 2021, her musical adaptation of Les Misérables garnered widespread acclaim, with one user on Bilibili commenting, “This is the first time I’ve seen a Chinese musical adaptation of such exceptional quality.”

In August 2023, she starred in the musical Nosferatu at the Qintai Grand Theatre, a production inspired by Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Her performance was lauded by the British arts magazine Our Culture Mag as “precise and nuanced, rich in emotion, with fluid and natural character transitions—truly astonishing.”

Together, these achievements highlight Angela Fantine Wan’s extraordinary skill in musical adaptation and underscore her pivotal role in bringing Chinese musical theatre to an international stage.

Among her many literary adaptations, Angela Fantine Wan has consistently sought to reinterpret classic works, striving to strike a delicate balance between remaining faithful to the original spirit and infusing a contemporary perspective. This equilibrium is particularly evident in The Garden.

This musical is primarily produced by London Angela Fantine Musical Cultural Creations LTD, and co-produced with China’s Wuhan Fantine Aug'Fane Cultural and Creative Co., Ltd.  with Angela Fantine Wan serving as both producer and one of the lead performers. This Sino-British collaboration imbues the production with a rare blend of classical elegance and localized nuance.

The original story of The Secret Garden is set in Yorkshire, where the moors, the manor, and even the regional dialect carry strong cultural specificity. The production team, with its experience in British theatre, possesses a natural advantage in recreating these cultural dimensions. Faced with the challenge of conveying the manor’s depth and the garden’s mystery within a limited stage space, Angela devised highly effective solutions. Through a combination of lighting, scenic projections, and stage choreography, the spatial limitations are transformed into immersive experiences.

For example, in the opening train scene, the entire cast stands layered behind Mary, singing of her new home: “On that hill, a grand manor stands.” The projected images of trees, hills, and moors, combined with dim lighting and immersive sound design, allow the audience to feel the desolate expanse of the Yorkshire moors, despite the stage’s physical constraints. This poignant atmosphere emerges from the seamless integration of visual and auditory elements.

The storm scene draws inspiration from both the forces of nature and the inner turmoil of the characters. Onstage, the storm functions not merely as a weather event, but as a tangible manifestation of emotion. Angela uses flashes of lightning and thunder—achieved through lighting and percussion—to create sudden tension, while the sound of wind and rain establishes a rhythmic, enveloping sensation across the stage. Due to space limitations, the stage is divided into zones, with actors moving through different areas as if struggling through the storm, symbolizing their inner fears and panic. The flickering lights delineate multiple narrative spaces that are both independent and interconnected, while actors’ physicality expresses the body’s responses to the tempest.

The music transitions from calm to urgent: strings and percussion intertwine to evoke the storm’s ferocity while mirroring the characters’ emotional turbulence. When Lily’s theme emerges, the music becomes dark, quiet, and ethereal—ghostly in its icy purity. Angela’s scenic design balances motion and stillness: the storm’s power captivates the audience, yet through lighting, projections, and choreography, the characters’ solitude, fear, and awakening are vividly conveyed. Even within modest stage apparatus, this meticulous design maximizes the emotional impact, rendering a scene that is at once a spectacular natural display and a dramatized reflection of the characters’ inner lives.

In The Garden, the garden itself serves as the musical’s central metaphor, embodying love, freedom, and home. Mary’s quest to find the garden is, at its heart, the journey of an orphaned girl seeking a sense of belonging. The depth with which the garden is rendered reflects the very depth of the musical itself. Angela Fantine Wan’s portrayal of Lily is focused on her direct interactions with the two children, making the garden’s “call” feel immediate and tangible.

Within this conceptual framework, questions naturally arise: how is the children’s faith conveyed? How are Mary and Colin’s arcs of self-growth dramatized within the span of a two-hour musical? Reinterpreting these elements inevitably presents challenges. Angela brings to life a narrative thread that in the original text is subtle—the secret guidance of Lily. Appearing as a ghost within the manor halls, rooms, and the garden itself, Lily manifests at each moment of suffering, always accompanied by hope: gentle, lyrical, and warm, like the vitality of nature itself. She appears to Mary in moments of deepest loneliness, to Colin in his locked room late at night, whispering “come to my garden.” Through her call, the children perceive the relentless renewal of life, inspiring them to face their own realities with courage. Even Archibald, the one most scarred by loss, is ultimately moved by the full bloom of the garden.

Although Lily is a ghost, carrying shadows of melancholy and sorrow, Angela’s performance imbues her with liveliness and playfulness. She is not the cold, distant specter of traditional ghostly portrayals; rather, she embodies the subtle softness unique to an Eastern feminine sensibility—not fragile, but quietly resolute in her protection. Her love exists in the breath she leaves behind, in the garden’s unfading life. It is precisely this warm, jade-like emotional texture that transforms Lily from a conventional “ghostly mother” of Western narrative into a poetic, Eastern-inspired spiritual symbol: she is the warmth within loss, the love that time cannot erase, and the hidden force guiding characters toward healing and renewal. Like a lily fairy, she reshapes a character of latent grief into a vision of vibrant spring emerging from snow and ice.

Under Lily’s guidance, in the scene where Mary converses with the bedridden young master Colin, the background projects the image of a fireplace while a delicate melody drifts from a music box. Mary tells Colin, “If we clear away all the withered plants, the roses will bloom in summer.” This line encapsulates the driving force behind the children’s growth: they are no longer passive witnesses awaiting the garden’s miracles, but choose instead to become its gardeners themselves. It is through this act of care and agency that a deeper dramatic tension emerges, intertwining the garden’s revival with their own transformation.

In this musical, the finale serves as the crowning moment of the entire production. “This is your garden, Mary.” “No—it’s ours.” As the song returns in the final scene, the stage is filled with vibrant flowers and gently flowing fountains, symbolizing both the garden’s flourishing and the characters’ awakened inner worlds. At this moment, Mary is no longer an orphan, and Colin is no longer confined to illness or his bedroom. Through their own effort and determination, they have revived the garden—and in doing so, they achieve profound personal growth. The finale not only celebrates the tangible transformation of the garden but also crystallizes the musical’s central message: that nurturing and agency can cultivate both nature and the human spirit.

“This is our garden.” This line becomes a shared declaration for all who seek self-wholeness and the freedom to live fully. The garden embodies a deeper logic of growth: from Lily’s gentle call to the children’s own assertion, it fulfills its symbolic purpose. It bears witness to healing, nurtures freedom, and guides those burdened by loneliness to rediscover the garden within their own hearts. Ultimately, the garden’s call resonates beyond the stage, reaching and stirring the audience’s own sense of renewal and hope.

In this new interpretation of The Secret Garden, Angela Fantine Wan brings Lily to life with delicate and profound vitality, while as creator and adapter, she reshapes the emotional architecture and expressive dimensions of the work. Infusing the narrative with the subtle grace, restraint, and resilience characteristic of Eastern femininity, she allows this classic to shine anew within a cross-cultural context.

Under her interpretation, Lily is no longer merely an echo of memory, but a living answer to the question of how love endures—even in absence, it persists in guiding others forward. Onstage, Angela embodies a pure, understated Eastern presence, whose gentle and restrained emotional resonance quietly moves the audience, enabling layered emotional development and ultimate catharsis.

From an educational perspective, the production provides young performers with a path to understand and convey emotion while offering audiences an opportunity to reflect on familial bonds, loss, and personal growth. Through such creative and performative vision, Angela Fantine Wan transcends mere storytelling, constructing instead an immersive emotional experience, making The Garden a work of both artistic depth and humanistic insight.

Photo Credit: The Garden