Lark Rise to Candleford review – tender, evocative tribute to rural lives in transition

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Flora Thompson’s autobiographical novels, about growing up in the late 19th-century Oxfordshire countryside, have been adapted for stage before, in a 1978 promenade production at the National Theatre. They’re now better known for the BBC series where Laura – note the rhyming name – guided us through the quaint doings of village folk, as quiet rural routines encountered an industrial, urban future.

In Hammerpuzzle theatre company’s new adaptation, Laura’s own story is very much the focus. We follow her journey from a childhood in which her future is limited, and her reading actively discouraged. Jessica Temple’s Laura is a tender mix of game and sensitive, clever and unworldly. Alongside her, director Bryn Holding deftly musters his five-strong ensemble of actor-musicians into entire communities, be it fellow schoolchildren comically reciting a backwards alphabet, or pubgoers performing a drinking song you’ll be desperate to join.

They’re also her family, bumping along on the cart that transports Laura from her humble hamlet to Candleford’s comparable whirl. Christopher Glover segues seamlessly from forbidding father to understanding uncle; Alex Wilson is searingly empathetic whether as brother Edmund, left behind in Lark Rise, or an Irish labourer hoping for news from home at the Post Office. It’s here – in Anna Kelsey’s immaculately dressed set – that Laura lands a job, under the energetic eye of Dorcas Lane (a bustling Rosalind Ford).

Tamsin Kennard’s script touches on feminism – Laura and Dorcas are “odd” women, like George Gissing’s spinsters – and politics (Laura’s father is apparently a liberal who abjures enclosures) without ever really embracing them. “All times are times of transition,” we’re told, but the narrative structure – which takes an unexpected turn in the second half – never lets us see quite what we’re moving towards. Genuinely touching encounters (Zrey Sholapurkar’s journalist is an awkward delight) lead only to homilies about not being able to have everything.

And yet this is a past, and a company, you’ll be more than happy spending time in. Between Thompson’s writing – we hear the rain “plash like leaden bullets into the leaden water” – and the theatre’s period surroundings, this evocative production is an affectionate tribute to a people who do, in the memoirist’s words, deserve to be remembered.