The
plot of the play, as Helen Edmundson outlines, is complex and epic in scope. It ranges over a nine-year period and involves a choir of 16, a string quartet, and 20
actors playing children, adults, and animals as well as gargoyles, angels and a wood. The action moves between the majestic interior of Gloucester cathedral, an elegant country house, a London orphanage, and a slave ship on the Thames. It tells of adolescent love, abandoned babies, the music of Handel, cruelty, generosity, social prejudice, and friendship.
As Melly Still says, at its heart is the story of
two boys from very different backgrounds. Alexander Ashbrook is from a rich household and is a musical prodigy, whilst Meshak Gardiner is the impoverished, mentally-damaged son of a wicked and violent man. Their very different life journeys become inextricably bound-up during their troubled passage into adolescence. Alexander’s search for personal and creative freedom is almost engulfed by the vortex of dirty and dangerous currents horribly familiar to Meshak, and found almost everywhere in this so-called age of enlightenment.
Rehearsals for
Coram Boy began on Monday, 12 September 2005 following six weeks of
workshops at the National Theatre Studio. As Lucy Davies, the Studio’s director, says, the Studio acts as
the National's performance laboratory. You can learn more about the workshop process for
Coram Boy and follow the progress of the actors from page to stage in the
workshop and rehearsal diaries on Stagework.