Max Porter’s Lanny turns an English village into rural noir

By Tom Whitfield

Max Porter’s novel Lanny has reached the stage in an adaptation by Bea Roberts, directed by Nancy Medina, with a village-and-woodland set by Rebecca Jane Wood and lighting by Zeynup Kepekli. The production turns the English countryside into the novel’s version of the Upside Down.

The critic finds a mixture of police procedural, social satire, pagan mythology and horror in the result. During the interval, one audience member called it “like Tales of the Unexpected meets Jackanory,” though the review judged those references several decades out of date. The comparison captures the strangeness, but not the rural noir at the story’s centre.

Porter’s novel offers a closer formula: The Missing meets This Country meets Stranger Things. Its many-voiced village seemed incompatible until the novel drew them together. Roberts faces a harder task on stage. The adaptation sustains pace and creepiness, keeping a potentially ridiculous mixture from collapsing into parody.

The cast establishes the human stakes:

• Raj Bajaj plays Robert, a townie who has moved to the countryside with his partner, Jolie.
• Hanora Kamen plays Jolie.
• Atlas Johnson-Dutfield played Lanny on press night.
• Richard Cant plays Mad Pete, a local artist and Lanny’s friend who becomes the prime suspect.

Robert and Jolie have barely settled in when their otherworldly son disappears. The police inquiry then runs alongside a pagan myth: Dead Papa Toothwort, whose presence also opens onto a parallel world. The play leaves open why the local artist carries the name Mad Pete. It may refer to his bohemianism or, as the source frames it, to his sexuality as a gay man in the village. The production does not settle the distinction.

A village of branches, antlers and disembodied voices

Wood’s set design gives the village and its woodland a haunted quality. Screens carry scratchy images of bare branched trees and antler-shaped silhouettes, recalling a Brothers Grimm storybook. Kepekli’s lighting opposes warm and cold registers, which the review credits with capturing the chilling magic of Dead Papa Toothwort’s parallel world.

Medina’s direction lets horror and humour share the same stage. The early emphasis on green man mythology, however, leaves domestic realism with too little space. Even so, the production finds a bridge between the frightening and the satirical, the dark and the light. That balance remains uneven rather than absent.

Porter’s many-voiced village gains an unusually physical form in the theatre. Disembodied audio carries the babble of modern life, sometimes joined by floating sentences written across the set. Village chatter becomes part of the stage picture. The treatment also intensifies the danger that the story’s feverish strands will crowd out its quieter social concerns.

What the adaptation keeps and what it loses

The review reads Lanny at root as a story about the pain, responsibility and emotional disconnect of parenthood. Robert’s question captures the stakes: “who can have children and not go completely mad?” Bajaj’s Robert is not an emotionally numbed father, but the performance still feels somewhat generic.

Kamen gives Jolie the sense of a mother left broken and furious by her loss. Johnson-Dutfield brings Lanny vividly to life, while Cant keeps Mad Pete central to the suspicion surrounding the boy’s disappearance.

The adaptation makes village homophobia more emphatic. It also identifies Lanny as a brown boy, adding a racial element that the review finds only partly developed. The addition becomes visible without becoming a fully developed line of conflict.

Other anxieties from the novel lose ground among the plot’s many strands. The review singles out the dislocation of urban newcomers living among sharper, more judgmental neighbours. It also identifies the question of who belongs in the village and whom the land itself belongs to. Here, fever and gothicism absorb questions that the novel leaves more open.

What does the stage adaptation change for the audience?

It turns Porter’s polyphonic novel into a production in which sound, image and myth carry much of the storytelling. The village becomes stranger and more visually coherent. Its central anxieties, however, remain unresolved.

The production also makes its limitations harder to conceal. Domestic realism receives too little room. The race of the missing child receives less development still. Neither thread disappears, but both remain secondary to a plot driven by disappearance, myth and menace.

The final scene swings into surreally hallucinatory territory. The happy ending might be a story, a song or a miracle: a pagan god showing mercy to the humans occupying his land. The staging preserves that ambiguity rather than choosing an explanation. It leaves open the same unresolved question about the village’s obligations to newcomers, and newcomers’ obligations to the land, that runs through the rest of the production.

If the adaptation is to do fuller justice to Porter, it must give domestic realism and the anxieties about race, sexuality and belonging more space than its current blend of police procedural, fever and gothic spectacle allows.