The Summer Book: Unicorn Theatre

As part of the celebrations feting the 100th anniversary of Tove Jansson, the Unicorn theatre presents an adaptation of The Summer Book, one of Jansson's ten novels for adults.

As the 100th anniversary of  Tove Jansson , Finnish writer and creator of the  Moomins , is celebrated this year,  Moominfever  is spreading across the art world. As Moomin fans, we couldn’t agree more with the fuss, but it’s a fever that makes this adaptation of one of the writer's less commercially known works (the Moomin books haven't been out of print since they were published more than sixty years ago) even more refreshing.

Adapted for this production by playwright  Jemma Kennedy , the original novel tells the story of Sophia and her grandmother,and their relationship during the summers they spend together on a small Finnish Island. Parents are almost absent - Sophia’s mother has died and the father barely hovers in the background - rather it is the grandmother’s gentle prompting that leads Sophia into personhood.

Nature is the third person in the relationship on the little isle, and Sophia and her grandmother pick it over together, grubbing up angleworms and moss and muddy sand. The pair are unobtrusive, and the island quietly makes space for them.

This is the gentle philosophy of the Moomins for an older audience, but the production is directed at an all-ages crowd. Director Douglas Rintoul has devised several innovative shows for children, including an adaptation of Clement Clarke Moore’s poem ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas , also at the Unicorn in 2013. Rintoul transformed the wide-eyed, childish, Christmas eve anticipation of Moore’s poem into an immersive one-man show, featuring a devoted scientist battling an onstage Arctic to prove beyond doubt the existence of Father Christmas. The finale visit from the jolly (but invisible) Mr. Claus himself went down a treat, too. 

But it is his work for adults that has been the most acclaimed, including a Royal National Theatre Foundation Playwright Award for  Elegy  in 2013. His production the same year of  As You Like It  transported the forest of Arden into a refugee camp, with Rosalind and Celia as migrants with no home. The director has sometimes been criticised for making kids plays too complex - granted immigration for toddlers is a challenging spec - but we predict the childhood to adulthood transition in Jansson’s story to be perfect fare for Rintoul’s talents.

With a story-teller’s love of narration, Rintoul tends to throw in a prologue there, a narrator here, making pictures on the stage and sucking out messy detail. If you want to abandon the Moomin hype for Janssonesque calm and beauty, this play should be the very thing.