A couple of years back, the disused Eurostar terminal at Waterloo station played host to a widely praised production of E. Nesbit’s 1906 weepy classic The Railway Children – complete with a star turn from a real steam locomotive.
Now the production is preparing to return to London, this time to a specially constructed 1000-seat theatre alongside the tracks just north of King’s Cross station, below King’s Boulevard.
As well as the return of a real 60-tonne steam engine to the ‘stage’, there will also be a cast of children to be made up from local (Camden borough) school kids. Auditions are taking place this Saturday at Jackson’s Lane Arts Centre on Archway Road. So for any budding 9-13 year old stars (or their proud parents), full details of the auditions can be found here.
Meanwhile, 5-11 year olds might like East Coast’s current competition to design a train and win a trip for their whole class from King’s Cross to any destination on the East Coast Main Line. More info on that right here.
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Both the competition and the play, which opens on December 16th and runs until March, support the Railway Children charity, which helps young runaways and street kids all over the world.
The land next to the mainline is actually now owned by Google, who intend to build their record-breakingly elongated new HQ there, once they’ve thrashed out the finer points of a design review that’s rumoured to be taking three years, that is. From steam engine to search engine, you could say.
