"The Railway Children"

Walking through Waterloo Station

So I will admit that I do own the audio tapes for E. Nesbit's story, "The Railway Children":  I bought them many years back, thinking I would play them for the kids while in the car on one of our 10 hour drives from Victoria to the Lake.  But somehow, we always ended up listening to something else, and the tapes never made it out of the box. 

So I was like the kids... coming to the production cold, with no idea about the story line, knowing only what I could see on the website, that is, that the play was being staged inside the Waterloo Train Station.  Waterloo used to be the terminal that the Eurostar left from.  However, the Eurostar now leaves from King's Crosss/St. Pancras, so there is a whole part of Waterloo station that is deserted.  So... that is where the play was staged:  right on the tracks themselves!   OK.  it was totally cool.  They use a real steam engine in this play (it comes in at the very end of the play), and so the 'stage' includes the actuall train tracks.  The seats are arranged in bleachers on either side of the tracks.  It was amazing!  They had a sort of platform that they used throughout to transform the space from london to the country, from inside to outside and back.  If you take a peak at the website, there are videos there that let you get a peek at the stage (http://www.railwaychildrenwaterloo.com/home/about/).   Great fun!