What if tiny beings lived under the floorboards of your house? Depending on your disposition, they might be imaginary friends, real-life playmates or a hideous threat to be expelled or exterminated. Such is the position that the Clock family of Borrowers find themselves in, in Mary Norton’s classic series of children’s books, which the Gate Theatre is bringing to life, with music and song, as its Christmas show for 2024.
When she began to write the books in the 1950s to support her four children, Norton was living in a postwar world of refugees, shortages and no small amount of fear. Sound familiar? The stories, which are recommended for ages seven and up, conjure a magical imaginative world of ingenuity, bravery and family love. They also pinpoint a time of change: old ways of life are dying out, and there is a striking dialogue between excess and the necessities of making do.
For Claire O’Leary, growing up in Cork, the diminutive people were both reason and excuse for untidy cupboards. “There was a walk-in wardrobe full of boxes and stuff in my mum and dad’s bedroom, and she’d be, ‘You can’t go in: the Borrowers are there,’” she says. The actor is making her debut at the Dublin theatre as Arrietty, the 11-year-old Borrower whose yearning to discover life beyond her small family’s secret home sparks the drama.
“Her whole world is shaken when she meets a boy, Tom, above the floorboards,” O’Leary explains. The pair are initially scared. Arrietty sees Tom as grotesquely huge, and he sees her as repulsively tiny. But, as O’Leary says, Arrietty sees the good in everybody, and they quickly get over their differences.
When Tom alarms her with the idea that they might be the last of their kind, she takes matters into her own hands, and Arrietty and her parents, Homily and Pod, set off in quest of their long “emigrated” relatives, Lupy and Hendreary, who they believe to be living in a badger’s sett “on the other side of the world” – actually two fields away. There is also the matter of the restless Eggletina, who may or may not have had her curiosity punished by being eaten by a cat.
So how do you set about creating a visual kingdom of supersized “human beans” – a phrase Norton is credited with coining – and tiny Borrowers?
It is easier on screen than on stage: there have been both live-action film versions, such as the 1997 movie starring John Goodman, Celia Imrie and Hugh Laurie, which leaned heavily on comedy, and animated retellings, such as Arrietty, made by Studio Ghibli in 2010.
Stage versions have called puppets into service, but Róisín McBrinn, who’s directing the Gate’s production, didn’t want it to carry a message of a bigger race “pulling the strings” of its smaller neighbours. Instead, as I see at a technical run-through at the theatre, Paul Wills’s brilliantly simple set is animated by mesmerising projections, light and sound from a team that includes Sarah Jane Shiels, Dick Straker and Kevin Gleeson.
Like all the best children’s books that also fascinate adults, The Borrowers doesn’t shy from darker themes. Reviews of productions from a decade ago alight on its messages of recycling and the circular economy. With certain dramatic exceptions, the Borrowers only “borrow” what the humans don’t need, and one of the joys of the novels, and of the staging, is to see the uses to which they can put fairy lights, cotton reels, matchsticks, hat pins, cogs, biscuit crumbs and nuts.
Responses to more recent productions have focused on how one race may see another as a threat, and the fear-stricken dangers of having to flee your home with nothing but what you can carry. To appreciate some of the parallels, McBrinn advised O’Leary to read The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, in which the teenage Holocaust victim recorded her life in an Amsterdam attic as she and her family hid from the Nazis during the second World War.
“It’s interesting, because Arrietty’s only friend before she meets Tom is her diary,” the actor says. “And there is the loneliness of it, and her terror, and the idea of how their whole lives can be ripped from under them at any time.”
But this Borrowers is far from sombre. It moves Charles Way’s script to Ireland, a process that included workshopping with Martin Beanz Warde, who also plays a trio of characters, and adds music and lyrics by Fionn Foley. All this combines to create an atmosphere of family love, adventure and discovery, alongside the wonder of invention that carries the narrative. There is also plenty of wit: “Fionn is a big man for a pun,” McBrinn says.
Arrietty’s parents, Homily and Pod, are played by Aoife Mulholland and Ben Morris. Mulholland is reading the Borrowers books to her own children. “I’ve got three boys, and they love anything about little people, magic and otherworldly stuff, so they’re well into it,” she says.
When we talk during a break in rehearsals, the three actors finish one another’s sentences and chip in to pick up threads of the story, already acting out, offstage, the role of family.
“They all fail at one point or another, they all let each other down, but then they all pick each other up again throughout the story,” Morris says.
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“We’ve talked a lot about the parallels between people who have come to other countries because their homes don’t exist any more,” he continues. “We have really tried to respect that, alongside all that comes with the entertainment of the play, and the fun of the adventures for younger people.”
In drama the two don’t have to be so far apart. “A child’s mind is much more open,” O’Leary says. “From a child’s point of view, they don’t see different groups: they have instant acceptance until told differently.”
“Even that bit with Tom,” Morris picks up, “when he says, ‘I’ll crush you with my book ... ’”
“And,” adds O’Leary, “he’s, like, ‘You’ll come at me with your nasty little hands,’ and I’m, like, ‘Mine are just like yours, only smaller.’”
In the Gate’s production, the fact that the Borrowers are not simply miniature humans but a race apart is emphasised by their brightly coloured hair. The costumes – also by Wills – are great fun too. “They don’t have sewing machines,” he notes, “so they’re folding, using origami, and the materials are what they can get.”
Pod wears a suit of maps; his more aspirational wife gets herself up in lace-edged napkins. Arrietty is a riot in an ensemble fashioned from red-lemonade labels. “I saw a guy in Tesco’s clutching four bottles to his chest,” Wills says, only half-joking.
The costumes are lower-key in the upstairs world, where the Borrowers-averse Mrs Driver – played with witty verve by Ruth McGill – attempts to keep the pyjama-clad Tom (David Rawle) in his place, as control threatens to slip from her just-gripping-on fingertips.
The action is set sometime in the 1970s, a useful tool for anyone wishing to stage a drama before the era of mobile phones. It is an apt choice, too, because Norton, who also wrote the books that became the Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks, moved to Ireland with her second husband in that decade (reportedly to avail of the new tax exemptions for artists).
She died in 1992. Writing in The Irish Times in 2011, Mary Leland describes how, visiting Norton at home in West Cork, she was “introduced to a lifestyle of heroic drinking; gin and game pie were always on the menu”. Leland also refers to Norton’s famous short-sightedness, describing how “she never quite saw the bigger picture, always instead the precise detail of what was small and unobserved”.
The ability to discover the wonder in the small, to focus on the more usually unnoticed, and to magic up whole worlds from a bit of bottletop and discarded cardboard is one of the glories of Norton’s writing, and of childhood. The best adults tend to be those who never lose it. Adding a hefty dash of delight for all ages, the Gate’s Borrowers, with luck, will appeal to the rich sense of this to be found, somewhere, in us all.
The Borrowers is previewing at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, until Friday, November 15th; it opens on Saturday, November 16th, then runs until January 12th, 2025
