BWW Reviews: MARY ROSE, Riverside Studios, April 5 2012

Theatre, of course, demands the suspension of disbelief and no genre demands it more insistently than the ghost story. DogOrange's Mary Rose (at Riverside Studios until April 28) helps the audience along with a wailing ensemble of spirits, the inevitable spooky lighting and a less inevitable and genuinely unsettling sound design (courtesy of Andy Graham and Mike Thacker).

But does it all work? Yes and no is my cop-out answer. Jessie Cave's Mary Rose is ethereally other as the innocent girl-woman who twice vanishes on a remote Scottish island, to return - if return be the right word - to a family possessed of all the knowledge of loss and grief that she has been spared. As her parents, Nicholas Hoad and Maggie Robson leaven typical Victorian stiff upper lip morality with a more modern sympathy for their son-in-law, Mary Rose's forsaken and loyal husband (played with puppyish loyalty by Carsten Hayes) and an understanding of their grandson's absconding to Australia. Director Matthew Parker catches a mood somewhere between post-Diana ostentatious grief as display and French and Saunders' caricature "Stuff and Nonsense!" dismissal of the pain of loss.

So that's the yes of my cop-out answer, so what's the no? JM Barrie's script is a little stilted, a little formulaic and too much of its time: the immediate aftermath of the industrial carnage of World War I. Barrie's message, spread over two hours, was distilled with beautiful economy in the Ode of Remembrance - 

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.

Mary Rose stands for the sons who disappeared in distant lands and never came back and for those who did come back but were never the same. This ghost story works well as drama, but better as elegy - which I suspect was the author's intention.