The Ghost of Sadie Kimber

Aug 16 2015 | By More

✭✭✭✩✩     Haunting family drama

Spotlites (Venue 278): Fri 7 – Sat 22 Aug 2015

A little girl just won’t settle down in this haunting family drama from new Edinburgh company Making Light Productions, at Spotlites until Saturday 22 August.

Laura, Nick and Sarah have moved with their parents to a new home, in this adaptation by Lucy Hunter of the novel by Pat Moon.

Cast of The Ghost of Sadie Kimber

Cast of The Ghost of Sadie Kimber

Teenager Laura (Jacinta Maud Hunter) misses her best pal Natalie. Twelve-year-old Nick (Robert Bingham) soon makes a new friend, Shane. But Sarah (Shaizeen Persha) meets Sadie: a little girl who, she tells her siblings, used to live there.

Nick assumes the child has moved to the nearby estate and popped back to see who’s in her old place, but it soon becomes apparent that they’re never going to meet Sadie. She can’t be seen. “An imaginary friend to help Sarah deal with her new circumstances”, say the kids’ parents, “just indulge her”.

Laura, though, soon tells an unbelieving Nick it’s something weirder, perhaps even sinister; Sadie could be the ghost of the little girl whom clues tell them was seven in the 1920s and would be long dead now.

jollies things along

This isn’t the scariest of theatrical hauntings, it’s not the Woman in Black. It is, though, a family-friendly tale perfect for children with a budding fascination for ghostly goings on, the ones for whom the idea of something under the bed is as exciting as it is terrifying.

The young cast are perhaps a little too Famous Five in their characterisations under the direction of Lucy Hunter, but their playing certainly jollies things along nicely.

The one casting problem is Canavan Connolly as an old woman who sheds light on the past. While appreciating that a company sometimes hasn’t the right gender mix for a show, having a strapping lad in a Rainmate essay a woman in her Eighties is a tad Monty Python. So much so, that you half-expected a gender switch twist.

That distraction apart, this is a show which is easy to relax into. A nicely written, well-played tale of the kind that Ladybird could publish as My First Ghost Story.

Those who know youngsters who could bear a mild chill, or who themselves fancy being transported back to simpler times, will find it worth giving a try.

Running time 55 minutes
Spotlites (Venue 278), 22 Hanover Street, EH2 2EP
Friday 7 – Saturday 22 August 2015
Daily, not Mon 17, 3.30pm.
Book tickets on the EdFringe website: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/ghost-of-sadie-kimber
Company website: http://makinglightproductions.co.uk/crew/
ENDS

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