Youthful cast wove a spell
In The Wake of the Mayflower, by Oliver Wingate, Laxfield Children's Drama Club

THIS play, specially written for the group, is set against the background of the Civil War in England and tells of a family's adventures from Ipswich to Massachusetts.

Religious fanaticism in the "New World" tried to turn herbalism into to witchcraft and the happy new life which everyone hoped for starts to look increasingly elusive.

The play featured more than 70 children of mixed ability and director, Louise Pratt, brought out the best in every one of them.

Moving so many children around a relatively small stage is an awesome task but it was brilliantly achieved.

There were some sparkling performances, full of energy and commitment as the cast acted out the story with the help of some excellent stagin ideas, the specially composed music of Michael Peck and the lighting managed by Orlando Riches and Emma Summerville.

The Laxfield Drama Club has been responisble for providing fun and training for many hundreds of children over the past 21 years and this production is a fitting was to mark the millenium.

The Walpole partnership of Oliver Wingate, writer, and Louise Pratt, stage director, conjured up the thunder and lightning of a fierce Atlantic storn in the Rifle Hall earlier this month.

It was the first production of Oliver's children's story In the Wake of the Mayflower, the saga of the Parfitts, a family of puritan refugees escaping religous persecution in 17th century Suffolk by making the long and dangerous voyage to the New World. But unbeknown to all but the Parfitt children, two young catholics went too, stowed away in a chest (made by Chris Northover). The unmasking of the secret 'papists' revealed bigotry and prejudice just as ferocious as the Parfitts had left behind. This infact as grown-up a story as you could find but Louise's throng of 70 young actors (some as young as seven) ebbing and flowing across the tiny stage made sure we saw the drama through children's eyes.

The strict disciplines of Louise's Laxfield Children's Theatre Club were greatly helped in all this by the choreographed waves of crowd activity introduced by Caroline Mummery - sometimes quite abstract, but in one scene wittily conveying the hustle and bustle of the Ipswich dockside, or later reinforcing the hysteria of a Massachusetts witch-trial. These were high points which had the capacity audience on the edge of its seats. But it was all pacey stuff, sometimes a little too pacey for the less experienced to let us hear their lines clearly.

However, the story line of this moral tale 'there's none so cruel as those who've suffered' - and 'there's none so fair as the English colonial service' - was strong enough to stand the moments of non-comprehension.

Then there was Michael Peck's music, unassuming but greatly supportive, whether from the group of recorders or his own violin solo's. And never so grimly asuming as in the chorus of bewhiskered plague rats, bent on spreading their influence among the new community. Throughout. Torben Merriot's lights were used to splendid effect: the storm scene was terrifyingly convincing. It must have been fantastically hard work, but fantastically rewarding. Revival next year please.

Should Halesworth, like the old city of Hamelin, send for the Pied Piper? Nearly every evening for a week in October, rats and mice of various sizes, all with ears and tails, some white, some brown, some grey, could be seen making their way to the converted maltings building, The Cut. But these rodents were no threat to children - they were children themselves, about fifty of them, members of the Laxfield Children’s Drama Club, coming to perform a play adapted from the book Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh by Robert C. O’Brien.

Especially in some powerful and carefully rehearsed movement sequences, imaginatively choreographed by Caroline Mummery, they showed how scientists developed a new breed of super-rats who then turned the tables on them by using their increased intelligence, and the help of the smaller white mice, to escape from the laboratory and from dependence on scavenging from humans, planning their own civilization. In turn, the rats helped a family of field-mice to move their home from the destructive path of the farmer’s plough. A very entertaining crow, with a weakness for shiny things, carried Mrs Frisby, the mother mouse, on his back to escape the large and fearsome cat, Dragon, who was hissed at by audiences like a pantomime villain. Even a dignified old owl guided Mrs Frisby with wise advice, in honour of her dead husband’s unselfish bravery. So, with mutual help and co-operation, the smaller creatures triumphed over larger and more powerful ones, Timothy, the ‘terribly sick’ youngest mouse in the Frisby family survived the dangers of the move, and the play ended with hope for ‘a new day’.

‘We don’t write the script, it just happens’, sang the animals in one of the delightful and often witty songs specially composed by Nick Murray Brown. But a production as complex and ambitious as this doesn’t ‘just happen’. For months the children had been working to build up all the elements of movement, speech, song, and the confident use of splendid props with the leadership and inspiration of their director, Louise Camplin, with her team of loyal helpers, all learning to work together co-operatively like the creatures in the story they presented with such vigour.

Perhaps it was tempting fate that one of the most memorable songs was the rats’ joyful celebration of ‘Light, light, light’, thanks to stolen (or ‘plucked’) Christmas tree lights in their underground home. An important run-through rehearsal was lost to a power-cut which plunged Halesworth into darkness. In spite of this, and further technical hitches with lights and sound, the children carried on with commitment to create a spirited and engaging production.