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Malory Towers the musical has toured the country and is currently showing in London at Alexandra Palace Theatre. This review of the production was written for us by Dr Jane Martin, mother and grandmother, and retired NHS consultant psychiatrist.

Malory Towers

The ‘Malory Towers’ series has been a favourite read for little girls since the 1940’s, when the Enid Blyton books were first published. Children are irresistibly attracted to Blyton’s world, where children are the brave protagonists having adventures, and adults are often relegated to being peripheral figures.

For girls, in particular, Blyton’s boarding school novels provide the ideal setting for the exploration of themes around female autonomy and the complex nature of friendships between girls. This is in contrast to, say, Blyton’s Secret Seven series, where the girls’ role is often that of dishing out the ginger beer and sandwiches whilst the boys enjoy all the daring fun.

And so it was that some eager eight year old girls and I were looking forward to the current production of Malory Towers, the musical, which is currently on tour (summer 2026).

The first thing to say about the show is to acknowledge that it is extremely well-produced. It is very professional, with a high standard of musical talent from all of the cast; the script is humorous, and the production is emotionally compelling.

But these positive attributes also create risk, because the power of live theatre is to invite us, the audience, into an immersive emotional experience, and thereby to invite us to empathise and to identify with the characters and their experiences. And this, our emotional response to the dramatic action, pulls us towards supporting the wishes and behaviours of positively depicted characters.

But, oh dear: Malory Towers has been queered. What could and should have been a celebration of girl power, bravery and initiative has been transformed into a celebration of gender ideology.

As with George in The Famous Five (another Blyton classic), there is one character in Malory Towers who is what Blyton’s contemporaries would have termed a ‘tomboy’. She is called Bill. In the written series she is not introduced until book three, but dramatic licence has understandably compressed the narrative for the purpose of a stage show.

Wilhelmina, a lone girl in a family of seven brothers, rides into the onstage action, having arrived at the school on her beloved horse, Thunder. Wilhelmina wastes no time in informing everyone that she prefers to be called Bill. In the original book this is written as a straightforward request, Bill being the nickname given to Wilhelmina by her brothers.

But in the stage show the character makes this request with a sneering contempt for the supposed girlishness of her given name and all its associations, accompanied by camp gestures, which, predictably, are designed to raise a laugh from the audience. Laughter makes us less discerning, less critical of the actual message being signalled here, which is that Bill/Wilhelmina’s material reality of being a female is something to be scorned and discarded.

Enid Blyton wrote this character as a girl with a passion for her horse, who likes to wear her hair short. Nowadays we might describe the character as not conforming to sex stereotypes, as determined by a given society’s expectations of social roles and behaviours stereotypically associated with males and females.

But the original Bill is undeniably a girl. In contrast, in the stage show’s script, the other girls repeatedly refer to Bill as a boy, a brother, and a hero. This is extremely confusing for young children.

The production is billed as being suitable for audiences from the age of eight. After the show, I asked one of the eight year olds who had accompanied me to the theatre whether Bill was a girl or a boy. She was puzzled by the question, as she had assumed that Bill was a boy. This is unsurprising, given that every scene in the show either implied that Bill was a boy or was deliberately ambiguous about her sex.

My eight year old theatre-going companion continued to insist adamantly that Bill was a boy. Despite the fact that the story was about a girls’ school, she had been manipulated into accepting that one pupil could be a boy. This is exactly what gender identity ideologues intend.

Very young children tend to judge people’s sex according to cues such as their clothing and hairstyle. By middle childhood they become more able to discern who is male and who is female, as they have developed an understanding of sex constancy.

But this production’s narrative, plus the power of the immersive emotional experience, had convinced an intelligent eight year old to temporarily abandon her knowledge of material reality. Fortunately it was only temporary.

When I pointed out the fact that there were scenes where Bill was in bed in the school dormitory with the other girls, she paused and reflected on this, then said thoughtfully that, if Bill was a boy, then it was “wrong” for him to be in bed with the girls. But she was quite troubled by the paradox.

The deliberate insertion of adult gender ideological themes into children’s theatre is extremely confusing and unfair to children.

Dramatic adaptations of books routinely change characters, themes and plot lines; there is nothing unusual or unacceptable about that. What is unacceptable here is the manner in which this production manipulates the audience to experience a beloved children’s book character who doesn’t conform to gendered stereotypes as having changed from being a girl to being ‘trans’ or ‘non-binary’.

That Bill is trans or non-binary is never actually spelled out explicitly, but we, the audience, are repeatedly emotionally manipulated by the confusion and conflation of themes that are woven into almost every aspect of the production.

In one of Bill’s earliest appearances on the stage, she sings (beautifully) about the importance of being brave and being true to yourself. In other words, her song carries all the usual trans themes. According to the plot, another character, a timid girl, has not dared to tell the others the truth about some bullying that has been going on between the other girls.

Bill’s impassioned song is introduced at this point to inspire the timid character to be brave by telling the other girls the truth about the bullying. But the subtext is to conflate the bullying theme with a trans motif, so that the message is also about gender identity, and it is Bill who preaches it in her song.

The hidden truth about the bullying has caused conflict between the other girls. This conflict is resolved after a dramatic rescue, when Bill rides on Thunder to rescue two of the girls who are hanging over a clifftop. It is indeed dramatic, and on stage the scene works well.

But it is a travesty of Blyton’s original story, in which one girl rescues the other, without the intervention of this male-identified character on a horse, who is then subsequently feted by the girls as their “knight in shining armour”.

Blyton’s Malory Towers books celebrated girls and the complexities of their emotional attachments to each other, with strength of character very definitely as a major theme running right through the series, and no knights in shining armour were required.

The whole production is shot through with in-group references. For example, there is a powerful facet of the gender identity movement that encourages children, teenagers and young adults to reject their parents and families if they will not endorse and ‘affirm’ a gender identity.

These children and young people are advised, usually online or by the numerous lobby groups who operate in schools and youth organisations and services, that they can instead choose to join a new ‘glitter family’ who will accept them and affirm them with their chosen gender identity.

Glitter, like sparkles, rainbows, unicorns and other iconic symbols with child appeal, is a common metaphor for transgender ideology. The alternative family, or ’glitter family’ is, of course, the online community of gender identity believers. Sometimes, and more sinisterly, predators seeking new victims for emotional and/or sexual exploitation have appeared in online videos attempting to convince vulnerable teenagers that they are now their ‘real family’.

Throughout the stage production of Malory Towers, there is frequent repetition of lines such as “we’re your family now”, whilst the real families of the girls boarding at the school are depicted as neglectful, or otherwise flawed, unreliable and abandoning. (It is even heavily hinted that the father of one of the girls has committed suicide as a consequence of war trauma, therefore school will have to be her new home).

This is nothing like the original books, where parents are, at worst, emotionally rather out of touch and distant – representing, perhaps, the ‘stiff upper lip’ of the British upper classes in the 1940’s. However, there is a constant refrain throughout the production of parents being not much use and therefore dispensable.

This theme of the need for an alternative ‘family’ chimes with the transgender culture of driving vulnerable children and teens away from parental influence and into the warm embrace of those who would alienate them from their sexed bodies. It also resonates with the transgender movement’s message to children that any attempts by caring parents to urge caution are not normal parental concern and safeguarding, but are malign, and even a form of conversion practice.

Then the production incorporates veiled references to other internet-enabled subcultures, which are sometimes related to transgender subculture, such as ‘furries’ (people who dress up as animals, or wear animal parts such as tails), or ‘therians’ (people who identify as animals).

The last part of the stage show features the girls putting on their own production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (in the original, third Malory Towers book, the school play was Romeo and Juliet, so the change of the Shakespeare play is deliberate).

In Malory Towers’s version of Midsummer Night’s Dream in the stage show, Bill plays Puck – of course she does – the mischievous, male, Shakespearian character who plays tricks on the others, such as giving Bottom an ass’s head. Bill gets a lot of laughs from playing Puck. At one point Bill-as-Puck turns her back on the audience, and there are knowing sniggers from some adult audience members when she is seen to be sporting a furry tail. These are adultified references, for those in the know.

There is a grand musical finale, where a cascade of glitter pours down on the actors, and the Bill character leaps to the drums and plays them. At this point, all the girls literally dance to Bill’s tune.

This is a powerful metaphor for what should have been a celebration of girls’ strength and solidarity, but which turns them instead into bystanders who have been manipulated, as was the young audience, into seeing a girl as a boy, or some impossible indeterminate sex in between (significantly, the character is played by an actor who describes herself as ‘non-binary’).

Despite the cast singing lots of lovely songs about becoming strong women, the transgender message has subverted this production into something else, and the result is a confusing soup of ideological disinformation.