Tiny tears

MONTHS ago boss of Northern Stage, Newcastle, Erica Whyman opted to direct Australian playwright Matt Cameron's play, Ruby Moon, about a missing five-year-old girl as her second project at the newly reopened Newcastle venue.

Then Madeleine McCann was abducted in Portugal and TV's most-watched soap Coronation Street re-wrote a missing child storyline to avoid causing her family any upset. Whyman decided to press ahead with rehearsals for Ruby Moon and when asked about her decision says: "This play is not centrally about Ruby and her disappearance so there was never a question of re-writing. What did happen is that we were first of all very moved and at the point where we were trying to get our heads around these characters and how they must be feeling. Then, all of sudden, two people in a very similar situation are all over the news," she responds.

Ruby is never seen in the play, which is a two-hander starring Tilly Gaunt, as the mother Sylvie, and Nick Haverson, as Ray the father.

"We were very troubled that it was so close to the real event but the actors and myself felt that it mattered we told this story because what was on everybody's lips was 'how must it feel to be them and what can we do and is it all right for the press to put such pressure on the police and is it all right to see the parents constantly on screen?'," says the artistic director.

She speaks of a line in the play which tells of the "grief tourists who have come and gone" which Whyman feels is an acute way of presenting the play's theme. The actors play the parents and also the neighbours they interview when the couple make one last effort to discover the truth about what happened to Ruby on the short journey to the end of the cul-de-sac where she was due to visit her grandmother.

Does Whyman see potential protest to the production as a difficulty?

{I don't know if it's a problem certainly it's suddenly very timely in a way that none of us could have predicted. We've obviously talked about it endlessly and been very affected by the coverage of what's happened but it seems to us, if anything,more important that a play like this is done because it investigates the damage done to parents both by the event itself and the attention they receive.

"It's a play set some time after a child's disappearance, we don't know how long, but we know it was a long time. It's really a play about grief so in so many ways that I think it will make it a touching and troubling thing to come and see. Somebody else asked me how do I feel in relation to Coronation Street pulling its storyline but I feel that television is a completely different thing and very much about naturalism and presenting a slice of life. Theatre is a place for debate and asking difficult questions as well as entertaining people."

Whyman points out that in spite of the subject matter the play is far from bleak - with some characters presented as highly entertaining - but it was always the company's strong view that it was really appropriate for the production to go ahead.

"It's a play written four years ago in response to a number of child abduction stories in Australia, some of which very closely resemble the Portugal case in that there are very few clues and that the parents are endlessly seeking a clue or lifeline or somewhere to turn, huge media attention - devastating at the time and devastating when it goes - and also that theatre is metaphorical. So it is a play about all kinds of grief and how a couple in any traumatic situation have all kinds of different responses and how they support each other or fail to support each other or tear each other apart.

"All of us have been in relationships and some of us have been in relationships which can't deal with what life throws at you."

Whyman's been in charge at Northern Stage for 18 months, although the doors of the revamped building only opened for business again back in August. She agrees it's been a rollercoaster ride because the strong-looking autumn/winter and spring seasons have attracted small audiences until recent weeks and are now looking much healthier.

Some might have crumbled when the main house of 750 seats failed to attract more than 100 or so ticket-buyers each night but Whyman says: "What's kept me going is the enthusiasm of the people who came the day we first opened the doors. People told us there was a need for work which was challenging, provocative and sophisticated and a need for lots of big family shows that we've done. I guess that the couple of thousand who came in the first months were really enthusiastic so we did stick to our guns. We're not programming work that is familiar to people, there's a few big names like Robert Le Page and Cheek By Jowl but these were companies who had not been to Newcastle for a long time and were not well known."

Whyman's next project is equally high profile with a decision to put Peter Flannery's original script of Our Friends In The North, written 15 years before it became a TV hit, on the Newcastle stage in September.

"It's a huge project with lots of characters and very different to the TV version. I think it's timely in 2007 to do a play about the end of one particular Labour era," she says.

{IT'S very important that we get the message to the audience that theatre can be hugely satisfying because it asks quite a lot of you, asks you to imagine and Ruby Moon is a play that will challenge people."

At the heart of Ruby Moon is that this is a story without an ending. "I don't want to give it away but the ending is very frustrating for the parents because there is no one simple answer. There was a case of a child in Australia, which inspired Matt, who went missing 27 years ago and there were a number of clues which didn't add up to anything.. she's never been found.

"All people can relate to a child going missing on their watch when they're responsible because it points up how powerless we are and we've all been children so we do connect to the story."

* Ruby Moon runs from Tuesday until June 9 at Northern Stage, Newcastle. Box Office: 0191-2305151