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Splendid but difficult story of Coram orphans
CORAM BOY
National Theatre
PRACTICALLY anyone with small children living south of the Euston Road will have spent time at Coram’s Fields playground in Bloomsbury, whose seven acres cover the site of the 18th-century Foundling Hospital.
As you enter its gates, you pass by an alcove where desperate mothers would leave their bastard babies to be raised by charity.
Coram Boy, based on Jamelia Gavin’s award-winning children’s novel of the same name, is the tale of two of these foundlings.
And what a dark and sombre tale it is.
Melly Still and Ti Green’s gloomy set designs form the unsettling backdrop for the horrors that unfold, including infanticide hanging and lunacy.
Beautifully performed though it is, it is not exactly festive fayre and certainly unsuitable for children below the age of 12.
The central figure of town tinker Otis Gardiner (Tim McMullan) emerges early on.
Known as the Coram Man, women pay him to take their terrible secret to the foundling hospital.
But instead of saving the infants, he murders them. By a quirk of fate, one of the them, Aaron (Katherine Manners), is rescued to become a Coram’s orphan alongside Toby (Debbie Korley), an African boy taken from a slave ship.
At the age of eight, Toby becomes a servant to a sinister city merchant, who procures Coram girls for prostitution. What follows is a gripping escape and denouement involving some amazing coincidences.
The composer Handel, along with the painter Hogarth, was one of hospital’s chief fund raisers.
His music, performed by string orchestra and choir, forms the backbone of the play.
The rousing finale of the Hallejuah Chorus is a uplifting end to a splendid, if difficult, piece of theatre.
Until Feb 23
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