Never Let Me Go: Ishiguro’s sci-fi chiller gets an oddly unscary makeover
The most chilling quality of Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro’s second most famous novel, is a very English strain of willed resignation – almost stiff upper lip. How else to explain why the book’s characters, who are clones reared for eventual organ donation, move towards their assigned fates with barely a flicker of rebellion or outrage?
Putting this work of soft science fiction on stage makes strange sense, in an adaptation by Suzanne Heathcote that does plenty of fluent justice to Ishiguro’s concept. Wherever they are, Christopher Haydon’s fast-moving production never lets Kathy H (Nell Barlow), Tommy D (Angus Imrie) or Ruth C (Matilda Bailes) get away from being institutionally shackled, their horizons cramped by the adulthood they will never be allowed.
The stage has a single bed on it, preordaining the end while these stunted lives unfurl, and Joshua Carr’s skilful lighting defaults to a mildewy green, redolent of NHS wards. Kathy has, for 11 years, been a brisk, orderly carer for fellow clones she does not know, as they near what Ishiguro calls “completing” – the euphemism society has picked for their demise after one or more vital organs have been harvested.
The wider world conspires to treat these spare humans as less than fully human: it’s easier that way, as in The Handmaid’s Tale, to bypass moral qualms, keep calm, and carry on. The trick played on this particular trio is to have been educated at Hailsham, an experimental boarding school which teaches them art, to move the needle by proving they have souls inside.
Kathy’s misplaced nostalgia for her school days requires plentiful narration, delivered with a breezy naïveté (as on the page) that risks being faux. Heathcote has devised a new character, Phillip (Maximus Evans), who is in Kathy’s care, and who’s fascinated by Hailsham, like all clones who never attended. He has a rugged bluntness that chafes nicely against Barlow’s finishing-school polish, teasing out an underlying class theme about who gets to be “special” and what that even means. In his vigorous stage debut, a prowling Evans straight-up refuses to let Phillip be a mere device.
Both Imrie and Bailes gain a firm grip on the pair whose relationship thwarts Kathy’s chance at love, after somewhat overegging their childhood frolics. Bailes shrivels forcefully into bitterness, while Imrie becomes touchingly vulnerable, almost Peter-Pan-ish, as an overgrown lost boy. Meanwhile, Barlow gains confidence when the narration, an inherited millstone, is off her back, though her Kathy H remains a little walled-off in her bedside manner, too enigmatic to move us (less, anyway, than Carey Mulligan managed, in the 2010 film).
The play is lucid on what happens to any life when it’s reduced to a form of utility – ironically, it gains a clearer (if more shudder-inspiring) purpose than any of us know. Where this rendition feels more torn is between wanting to understand Kathy and backing off wide-eyed, finding a specimen who’s pitifully in denial, forever stuck
Until Oct 12; rosetheatre.org