Goodnight Mister Tom

“To my shame I auditioned her once in a children’s production and she didn’t get the job,” he laughs backstage at London’s Phoenix Theatre.

“Hopefully she forgave me. She’s a very good actress – she just wasn’t particularly right for what I was doing.”

Magorian penned her debut novel Goodnight Mister Tom in dressing rooms up and down the country while working as an actress in repertory theatre.

Wood believes this helped when it came to adapting the book for the stage.

“When you can make a book work onstage very often it’s because they are written by people who have some sort of theatre connection or interest in that world,” he says.

“It’s to do with awareness of people, situation and character, seeing things from different people’s view.”

He read the book when it came out but it was Magorian’s second book, Back Home, about a girl returning to austerity Britain after being evacuated to the US for five years, which was his first choice to adapt three years later.

“I was a judge on the Whitbread Children’s Book section,” says Wood. “I’d been sent 75 books to read but there was one book I couldn’t put down – I was walking up the steps of an airplane reading it at one point. I was so taken by Back Home I knew I had to do it somehow.”

The New York Film And Television Festival gold award-winning movie in 1991 led to him meeting Magorian again.

When the author admitted she would like to see an adaptation of Goodnight Mister Tom for the stage, the long journey to get the rights began.

Wood’s first meeting with Goodnight Mister Tom director Angus Jackson was much more promising – and certainly made a big impression on the young Jackson while he was training as a percussionist.

An 18-year-old Jackson was given Wood’s name as someone to speak to about breaking into theatre.

Three years later, the future director looked Wood up in Spotlight, called him from a Leicester Square phone box and met him for a coffee in London’s Covent Garden.

“We chatted for an hour,” remembers Jackson. “He told me stories about being directed by Lindsay Anderson in If... who got Malcolm McDowell and him drunk to do a scene.”

The next time they met was in the car park at Chichester Festival Theatre, where Jackson was by then assistant director.

When Wood began discussions with the theatre about Goodnight Mister Tom, Jackson’s name came up and the pair collaborated on the production which debuted at the theatre in January 2011.

According to Jackson, this isn’t the first adaptation of Goodnight Mister Tom to hit the stage.

“There was a musical version without a dog,” he says. “When I think about it I don’t know how it could work, but it had its life.”

Indeed putting Mister Tom’s dog onstage was one of the challenges facing the production – after all Sammy is the non-speaking character which provides a connection between the terrified young William Beech and the curmudgeonly Tom.

“David said in the original script that we might be able to do it with a live dog,” says Jackson. “We’ve never tried it though.

“We also wondered about whether we should do the story with real children or adults playing children, but we thought if William is going to be battered and bruised it would be better with a real boy.”

Sammy is represented by a puppet, operated onstage by Elisa De Grey and created by Toby Olie and Laura Cubitt who both worked on the National Theatre production of War Horse.

“The dog is remarkable – in the rehearsal room it looked like cardboard and felt, but the moment it started moving was amazing,” says Jackson.

“We have added a puppet squirrel, hedge sparrow and crows – there is a lot of fun to be had. It creates the idea of a rural idyll.”

Magorian’s story is episodic, as William slowly comes out of himself and the friendship between the boy and his elderly carer develops.

That structure created its own challenges for the director.

“There are 20 scenes in the play, so we didn’t want 20 scene changes each taking 30 seconds each,” says Jackson. “We didn’t want too much trucking on and off.”

The solution was to employ a fairly sparse open stage, backed by a giant Dorset postcard, to stand in for both Tom’s house, the schoolroom, village hall and locations around the village.

This all changes in the second half, when William returns to London to live with his disturbed mother, and Jackson pulls off an impressive coup de theatre with the creation of the Beech household, which is literally pulled up from under the stage using long chains.

“In the second half everyone has got comfortable and then the tables turn around,” laughs Jackson. “I wanted to surprise them.”

Another important element of his production is his use of sound, which he puts down to his early career in percussion.

“I like things to go crash!” he says. “It’s something you learn from Hollywood movies – things that go thunk or click. I believe audiences like it.”

The scene changes are heralded by music, specifically Gracie Fields’s classic wartime song Wish Me Luck (As You Wave Me Goodbye), which provides both an introductory theme for the evacuees and an extra emotional charge when it comes to the story’s big departures.

It was first suggested by the play’s composer Matthew Scott, after various experiments with songs including Run Rabbit Run and Winter Wonderland.

Elsewhere Wood has composed his own playground taunt, Vaccy Vermin, used by the village kids against the evacuees, and William in particular, underlining the conflicts as the youngsters flooded in.

“Evacuation would never happen today,” says Wood, who was an evacuee himself as a baby with his family.

“Parents wouldn’t allow their children to be evacuated – but in those days it was acceptable. The children could go off on their own, with no checks on the people they were going with.

“My mother and I went off only for a short time. We went to Cuffley in Hertfordshire but I would have been only one year old so I don’t remember anything about it.”

Wood feels the evacuee story is an important part of the original book’s success, but he also points to William Beech as the story’s protagonist.

“Many children’s books have a child protagonist to whom nasty things are happening – from The Secret Garden to Roald Dahl,” he says having adapted eight of Dahl’s stories for the stage.

“What children have in common is their sense of fairness and justice – one of the first things they will say is ‘It’s not fair’. It’s why Cinderella is one of the most successful pantomimes ever.

“We root for William Beech and want him to succeed. Another element is the journey – and Tom’s is just as important as William’s. It’s important that they have each other – the recluse who hasn’t connected with anybody since his wife’s death, and the boy who has been maltreated, who hardly speaks and can’t read or write.

“Michelle is a great believer in the improving quality of the arts in our lives. It was important to her that William is good at painting and drawing and it helps him come through this part of his life.”

• Goodnight Mister Tom is at Theatre Royal Brighton, New Road, from Tuesday, February 19, to Saturday, February 23. Shows start at 7pm, with matinees on Wednesday and Thursday at 1pm and Saturday at 2.30pm. Tickets from £10/£8. Call 0844 8717650