Autumn review – Ali Smith adaptation has humour and charm in spades

Park theatre, LondonIt is a treat to see this kaleidoscopic meditation on stories and the nature of time brought to the stage, even if at times the play struggles to hold the full weight of its ideas
Kate WyverSun 20 Oct 2024 06.32 EDTLast modified on Sun 20 Oct 2024 08.25 EDTShareWhat a treat, years after reading the book, to finally go for a walk with Daniel Gluck. This is a man who talks of words as things that grow and of the world as something to be read, who throws a watch into a canal to demonstrate how time flies. Ever curious and easily delighted, Gary Lilburn’s twinkling performance as the cheeky old storyteller is the beating heart of Harry McDonald’s new stage adaptation of Ali Smith’s novel Autumn.
An uneven patchwork of a play, this intimate new production seeks kindness and care in our too-often apathetic world. With Daniel asleep in a care home for most of the play, the story is told in jumbled flashbacks as 11-year-old Elisabeth (a wide-eyed, forthright Rebecca Banatvala) shyly meets her old neighbour and quickly falls into a firm friendship that worries and baffles her mother (Sophie Ward, brows creased). Together they take long walks, with Daniel cracking open the world for Elisabeth as they wander and wonder together, turning over truths to see new perspectives, like shining a light through a diamond.
View image in fullscreenMoments of illumination … Sophie Ward and Nancy Crane. Photograph: Harry ElletsonAutumn was the first in Smith’s seasonal quartet that aimed to grapple with changing world events as quickly as the publishing world would allow. Brexit buzzes in the play’s background, with multi-rolling Nancy Crane giving a comically smug performance as a post office worker who follows the rules around new passports to the point of absurdity.
Directed by Charlotte Vickers, the play has humour and charm in spades, but it struggles to hold the multitude of ideas, with the second half frequently drifting. While the text adeptly transposes the novel’s attention to stories, it wavers in its ability to do the same with art, the messy dreamscapes of 1960s pop artist Pauline Boty unmooring us from the rest of the action.
Words, here, are not given the same kaleidoscopic possibility as in Smith’s novel, where such pleasure is found in the way they partner and play on the page. Yet there are moments of illumination, where the novel, so deeply intrigued by time and how we all experience it, feels perfectly suited to an art form that disappears each night, to be seen anew the next.
At Park theatre, London, until 2 November