The Secret Garden review – children’s classic replanted as a haunting musical

John Doyle’s atmospheric production shrouds Frances Hodgson Burnett’s story in the ghosts and secrets of the grownups at Misselthwaite Manor

In this version of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic children’s book, the eponymous garden is nowhere to be seen. York Theatre Royal’s revival of the Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon musical opens with the stage shrouded in dust sheets, setting the tone for what’s to follow. This is a gloomy, interior space, filled with ghosts and secrets, into which young newcomer Mary Lennox finally starts to shed some light.

Norman’s adaptation shifts emphasis away from Mary and her young companions and on to the adults in the story: Mary’s tortured uncle and guardian Archibald Craven, his conflicted brother Neville, and the ever-present spirit of his beloved dead wife Lily, whose walled garden Mary discovers and brings back to life. It makes for a darker, more haunting telling of the story, atmospherically accompanied by Catherine Jayes’ orchestrations of Simon’s score. Director John Doyle’s actor-musician production adds to the sense of phantoms watching from the walls of Misselthwaite Manor, with the multitalented players constantly present on the edges of scenes.

But what’s lost here is the magic of Mary’s transformation under the influence of nature. The only suggestion of the world beyond the manor’s walls in Doyle and David L Arsenault’s set design is a series of rising and falling gauze sheets printed with an impression of the Yorkshire Moors; everything else is left to the imagination. This is perhaps a nod to the story’s literary origins, reinforced by the choice to have Mary in modern dress carrying around a copy of the book – though these references to reading and to the contemporary world are never taken any further.

The truncated storytelling, meanwhile, allows for little more than fleeting vignettes between Mary and the various characters she encounters: kindly maid Martha, Martha’s animal-whispering brother Dickon, loyal head gardener Ben and Archibald’s sickly, locked-away son Colin. While there are tender, nicely performed moments with each, the action jumps from song to song and scene to scene with little sense of development in between – not helped by the often static staging. The overall effect is something like a dream: all mood, little drama.

• At York Theatre Royal, until 4 April