It is always heartening to watch an unexpected theatre take on an ambitious project – and succeed strongly in its execution. This is precisely what is happening at the Rose with this splendid adaptation of Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro ’s 2005 novel, a quietly horrifying narrative about a contemporary England in which clones are bred for the express purpose of organ donation. It is the trickle-down accumulation of small but sinister details that gives the book its power to disconcert, a skill carefully replicated by Suzanne Heathcote’s sharp script.
We start in a bland but cryptic medical facility, where affable Kathy H (Nell Barlow) is tending to a young man who is about to have an operation. Kathy has been a “carer” for 11 years, yet she is anything but a medical professional. When the young man discovers that she went to a school called Hailsham – a word that elicits a response of fear and awe from all who hear it – he clamours for details.
As Kathy starts to reminisce, scenes from her youth come to life and Heathcote masterfully manoeuvres parallel narratives of past and present, with the first line from each new scene dropped in at the end of the preceding one, thus eliding gaps of time and propelling us urgently onwards. Christopher Haydon’s confident production underlines how, on one level, the busy, closed world of Hailsham is like that of any other boarding school, with its quirks and rituals. Friendships and romances form, flourish and fail; Kathy is.