The children's story returning to its Yorkshire roots

A new theatre production of The Secret Garden is taking the popular children's novel back to its Yorkshire roots. Ahead of its opening night in York cast and crew members spoke about the "privilege" in bringing the story home.

"It's the moor. Miles and miles of wild land, that nothing grows on but heather and gorse and broom, and nothing lives on but wild ponies and sheep."

Elizabeth Marsh recites her lines from The Secret Garden - The Musical, in character as Mrs Medlock, complete with an Edwardian-era rural Yorkshire accent.

The moor she describes is the setting for the novel, written by Frances Hodgson Burnett and first serialised in 1910.

It tells the story of orphan Mary Lennox who is sent to live with her uncle at Misselthwaite Manor, on the Yorkshire Moors.

While there she discovers a neglected garden and through her determination to see it bloom once more discovers she is able to bring life back to more than just the plants and flowers.

The story has been re-told countless times over the past 115 years, with four film adaptations, three television series, a radio play and multiple theatre productions.

However, in York, director John Doyle says the story feels most at home.

"The piece is so suited to being done in Yorkshire," he says.

"The moors are a real character in the piece, they're a character in the book."

However, Doyle, who previously worked as artistic director at the York Theatre Royal, says he does not feel any added pressure staging the musical in the region.

"It's always a privilege to be able to bring a story back home, but it's always a privilege to tell a story," he explains.

A key question, however, is why Yorkshire was chosen by Burnett as the setting for The Secret Garden.

Born in Manchester in 1849, she split her life between England and the US, where she died in 1924.

According to biographer Ann Thwaite, inspiration for the story was drawn from a house in Manchester that featured a "small door in a wall that gave onto an empty forsaken garden", as well as a house in Kent where she lived for a number of years.

Burnett's father was born in Doncaster, her parents visited York Minster on their honeymoon and she herself stayed at the Yorkshire home of the Earl of Crewe in the mid-1890s.

But the Yorkshire described in The Secret Garden, Thwaite says, is "the Yorkshire of her imagination and the Yorkshire inspired by the Brontës".

"Frances Hodgson Burnett had certainly read both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and indeed probably all the Brontë novels," she says.

During her life, Burnett crossed the Atlantic 33 times, once being welcomed by crowds in Manhattan due to her celebrity status - thanks to her works which included Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess.

At the time, The Secret Garden was "hardly recognised" as being significant to Burnett's career, Thwaite adds, despite it "often [being] regarded as one of the most significant children's books ever written".

Thwaite says adaptations are "very important" to keep The Secret Garden alive, something Burnett would be "absolutely delighted" with.

"I do worry about children's reading now," she adds.

"If the musical encourages them to read The Secret Garden, that would be brilliant."

Yorkshire's links to the story stretch beyond the fictional setting.

The region is home to many locations used to film the 1993 and 2020 films.

The only place used in both productions is believed to be Fountains Abbey, near Ripon.

"Fountains is a character in Yorkshire," says Justin Scully, general manager at the World Heritage Site.

"We're really proud that both films tie into that history."

In 1993, Fountains Hall's exterior played the part of the fictional Misselthwaite Manor, with a door opposite featured as the entrance to the neglected garden.

Scully says visitors "love to make that connection between what they've seen on screen and realising that it's real".

"Particularly with the first film, this wasn't about CGI, this was about filming real places that you could say 'I've been there' or 'I know that'."

The Cistercian Abbey ruins were transformed into a sunken temple for the 2020 film.

It was flooded and dressed-up, with numerous tropical plants added, but producers still chose the location because of its "built-in atmosphere", Scully says.

"You can feel the history in the buildings - you can't replicate 900-year-old stonework."

Performing a story which is rooted in Yorkshire at the York Theatre Royal will enable audiences to "connect to it in a different way", says Catrin Mai Edwards, who plays Martha, one of the maids at Misselthwaite Manor, though she admits the prospect both "thrills and terrifies me".

Her castmate Marsh adds: "It's almost like a sense of ownership.

"The story is known internationally and it's really nice to pull out the elements of the story that really speak to the North Yorkshire Moors, that speak to the environment that this story is in and the weather."

Both have had support to master their characters' Yorkshire accents.

"We went through it word for word and sound for sound," Edwards explains, adding that she had compared Yorkshire phoenetics to those in her first language, Welsh.

Marsh says the accents used on stage are different to a typical accent now heard in the region, because of the story's rural and historical setting.

Edwards, originally from Mold, Flintshire, had only visited York once before being cast in the production, but says she loves the city's "striking" architecture.

"It's really helped to feel like I'm in the world of The Secret Garden just by being here."

Marsh adds that her first professional acting job was at the York Theatre Royal, directed by John Doyle, giving this show a "full circle" feel.

Similarly to The Secret Garden - The Musical, her first production involved actors playing musical instruments on stage.

Doyle says the actor-musician style was "incubated" during his time working in York from 1993 to 1997, but is now used worldwide.

"That feels really rather special to bring that way of working back here."

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