'the stage equivalent of a warm hug' Little Women, Liverpool Playhouse

It is early in the season to be feeling Christmassy. Yet Anne-Marie Casey’s adaptation of Little Women, the stage equivalent of a warm hug, leaves its audience with the kind of fuzzy glow that comes from the best festive theatre.

From the off, a decorated tree is centre stage at Liverpool Playhouse and Christmas is in the air, to be expected given that Louisa May Alcott’s coming of age classic opens with the March sisters preparing for a pared-back December 25^th featuring neither presents nor their father, who is away volunteering as a chaplain for the Union army during America’s Civil War.

Image credit: Nobby Clark

Also from the off, despite such relative privations, the four sisters are raucous in their dramatic games and in their affectionate sibling squabbles. If anything, they are a little OTT in these opening scenes. In trying to accentuate and establish the different characters of the quartet – spiky tomboy Jo, sensible Meg, kind Beth and spoiled Amy – the cast’s interpretations, particularly of the former, become broad in places. It feels, perhaps appropriately, that the actors grow into their parts as the sisters mature. Natalie Dunne is more rounded and believable as adult Jo faced with grief or love than when laying on the teenage feminist defiance a little too thickly, while Beth’s tormented efforts to reconcile herself with terminal illness are movingly played by Megan Richards.

Little Women being a book that mothers still pass on to their daughters more than 150 years after it was written, there was also poignancy in the foregrounding of Marmie’s struggles to parent her growing progeny, advising them to stay children “just as long as they can” and revealing to Jo that she too is human, battling with her temper and feelings of self-pity to convey an outward image of cheerful maternal self-sacrifice. Mums in the audience who once asked themselves which sister they identified with might well have realised the answer is now in fact Marmie, skilfully inhabited as she is by BAFTA-winner Juliet Aubrey.

Despite these modern inflections, this Little Women resists the temptation to follow Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film adaptation and play around with structure or endings. Gerwig’s version is acclaimed for a reason, but as Bhaer says of Jo’s book, Little Women is full of “truth, humour and emotion” in its original form. There is still plenty of scope for an adaptation featuring snowflakes, carols and a straightforwardly happy ending – even in early November.

By Fran Yeoman

Main image credit: Nobby Clark