LONDON — If you don't know your Gallivespians from your Gyptians or the difference between Svalbard and Bolvanger, then you should probably avoid "His Dark Materials."
The epic adaptation of English novelist Philip Pullman's best-selling trilogy is running through March 27 at the National Theatre, where a return engagement has already been announced for next Christmas.
Artistic director Nicholas Hytner's ultra-ambitious if not always successful staging leaps between universes during six-plus hours. The play combines Pullman's three books: "Northern Lights," "The Subtle Knife" and "The Amber Spyglass." (In the United States, the first book was titled "The Golden Compass.")
The amphitheaterlike Olivier auditorium has rarely seen its unique resources so extravagantly deployed, starting with a drumlike mechanism built into the stage machinery that moves the action among this world and the parallel ones of Pullman's sweeping saga. Giles Cadle's turntable and multilevel set shifts dizzyingly from such locales as a bus stop in the university city of Oxford to imaginary realms like Cittagazze, home to a host of preying specters.
In the lead role of plucky prepubescent Lyra Belacqua, Pullman's indefatigable 12-year-old heroine, Anna Maxwell Martin displays an incredible fortitude, given she is twice her character's age. Stalking the circular stage like an intrepid explorer, she is both hearty and heartbreaking.
At the same time, "His Dark Materials" demands its own fortitude from audiences, especially those who may be relative newcomers to Pullman's hyper-complex, not always consistent cosmology. (Among other questions worth asking: Is the tale's defining notion of "Dust" ultimately good or bad?)
Like the novels, Nicholas Wright's play version is a daunting, sometimes self-defeating task: 1,300 pages compressed into a pair of shows that has the air of a staged glossary.
At one point, Wright and director Nicholas Hytner thought of concocting three plays — one for each novel. In terms of time commitment, that would have put "His Dark Materials" on a footing with past trilogies performed in the National's 1,100-seat Olivier by David Hare ("Racing Demon," "Murmuring Judges" and "The Absence of War") and Tom Stoppard ("The Coast of Utopia").
But Hytner and company opted instead for compression, eager not to overwhelm the all-important family audience. And there lies the fundamental problem. Still, it is an undertaking that can be admired for sheer bravado even as the results prompt ambivalence.
Throw everything in, and you risk losing all but the books' most dedicated acolytes, even with puppet designer Michael Curry's "Daemons" (pronounced "demons") on hand to animate the animalistic alter egos that are the characters' companions. (There's a particularly splendid snow leopard.)
On the other hand, opt for excision and you enflame the purists.
The National adaptation bravely treads an uneasy middle ground. At the outset, much of the discourse seems over-explicit, gingerly telling the audience the spectacular tale of Lyra, the silver-tongued destiny's child who is a modern-day Eve. Mention of the Aurora Borealis is met with the dictionary definition: "Is it the Northern Lights?"
"His Dark Materials" has an array of vivid adults in a story that is as much about the reckoning children must make with their parents as it is a spin on "Paradise Lost" (Pullman's collective title for his books comes from the Milton poem).
Among the characters: Lord Asriel (Timothy Dalton), a fearless, God-hating explorer; Mrs. Coulter (Patricia Hodge), a fur coat-wearing glamorous matron; and a bevy of gyrating witches, led by the tantalizingly named Serafina Pekkala (Niamh Cusack).
Dalton, a former James Bond, is aging well and commands attention in a role some will take as Pullman's riff on pioneering British adventurer Ranulph Fiennes. Cusack is as agitated and frenzied as Hodge is cool and sleek.
But Maxwell Martin receives the most attention as the determined Lyra. Think of her as an incipient Lara Croft. With her heroic first love, Will (Dominic Cooper), she journeys toward a climatic sacrifice that is foreshadowed at the start. (Unlike the novels, Wright's play version uses a framing device.)
Whether you buy the metaphysics of a cultural phenomenon whose allusions could fill yet another book, there's no denying the power of Lyra's quest for love in the internal landscape of the heart. On that emotive front, at least, "His Dark Materials" sheds poignant light.