Pitlochry Festival theatre
This captivating production of the evergreen musical is a fitting swansong from Pitlochry’s outgoing artistic director, Elizabeth Newman

Light breaks through darkness; love heals ruptures – but only if we have the courage to make the right decisions. The Sound of Music (the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and the 1965 film) is based on the true story of the Von Trapp family in Austria on the eve of the Anschluss in 1938. Its appeal endures, as this new, joy-filled production demonstrates, because it speaks across time and space to today.

Ruari Murchison’s design suggests a space as much metaphysical as physical. At the back of the stage a dark shadow with sharp, geometric edges rises to meet a similar black mass, descending. A streak of light, mottled with pinks, purples, blue, seems to push them apart. Centre stage, a stepped dais revolves to represent a mountain, a domestic staircase, a church aisle.

The Sound of Music is at the Pitlochry Festival theatre until 22 December