Spoiler alert and all that, but playwright Suzanna Heathcote’s new stage adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go more or less assumes that we’re aware of the premise already… which to be fair we almost certainly are.
Set in an alternate Britain of the ‘80s and ‘90s, it’s about a trio of friends who attend Hailsworth, a liberal boarding school, and their gradual coming to terms with the fact that they are clones, raised by society as a dehumanised underclass, destined to be harvested for their organs.
Where the book and Mark Romanek’s film sneak this revelation up on you to some extent, the play begins with protagonist Kathy H (Nell Barlow) fulfilling her role of ‘carer’ to another clone, Philip (Maximus Evans). She is 31, a remarkable age when most of her peers are called to begin their ‘donations’ in their early twenties. Most survive the first donation - none survive beyond the fourth. Spoiler alert, but Philip – a character added by Heathcote – is not long for this world, though he dies providing a convenient starting point for Kathy to reminisce on her time at Hailsworth.
Heathcote and director Christopher Haydon offer a robust take on Ishiguro’s haunting, elegiac tale. Telling us what’s up from the beginning feels pragmatic. Though the novel and film feature Kathy’s narration, actually giving her somebody specific to talk directly to spares us cliches about characters addressing the audience. The matter of fact introduction of the premise allows the production to zero in on its central love triangle of school friends Kathy, Ruth (Matilda Bailes) and Tommy (Angus Imrie) without too much clutter. And here’s where the play is strongest, especially the interplay between Barlow’s sweet, resourceful Kathy and Bailes’s brittle, bitter Ruth, who is slowly crushed and acidified by the knowledge her time is so limited.
In many ways it becomes more of a play about doomed youth than the specifics of Ishiguro’s dystopian vision. Which is fine as that’s a distillation of the story’s core: it’s about three young people facing inevitable death, and how each deals with it very differently. But the dystopian stuff is obviously still here and feels more jarring than in the carefully stylized worlds of the film and book. The trio feel so ‘normal’ that it’s hard to really get your head around the more outlandish details of their lives, and the fact that after leaving Hailsworth they’re largely free to roam the country at leisure until called up to die. These are reasonable questions of the book too, but Ishiguro’s writing – and Romanek’s direction – skilfully deflect them in a way that this more boisterous production simply doesn’t.
It’s still a fine, engrossing piece of theatre that nails the human drama of the novel – but there’s surely a greater stage version of Never Let Me Go to be made.
