This is the Christmas show to beat – a deliciously spiky supernatural tale that honours the dark streak in Roald Dahl’s child-pleasing writing. It has a witty script from Lucy Kirkwood, jauntily rousing songs from Dave Malloy, and three fine adult comic performances that were nonetheless outdone by the astonishingly confident younger leads (Bertie Caplan and Cian Eagle-Service) on opening night.
There’s also great perspective work using clockwork rodents once our two young heroes are – spoiler alert – turned into mice. Forget WC Fields’s dictum not to work with children or animals: here director Lyndsey Turner has great fun with children *as* animals. It’s also a family show that adults can thoroughly enjoy.
Ten minutes in, 10-year-old Luke (Caplan) is orphaned and given into the care of his strange Norwegian grandmother (Sally Ann Triplett, having a blast). She’s got a metal thumb, a best friend called Helga who’s a garden gnome, and a heavy cigar habit. When she has a heart attack, they withdraw to the Hotel Magnificent in Bournemouth, where Daniel Rigby’s hilariously uptight manager makes Basil Fawlty look positively Zen.
Worse, the hotel is unwittingly hosting a conference of the UK’s child-hating witches. Their Garbo-accented head honcho (Katherine Kingsley, glacially funny but missing some top notes and a killer edge) has devised a potion that will turn all kids into mice that can be easily eradicated. No, this doesn’t completely make sense, even in the original book. Yes, Luke and his gran rise to the challenge.
The censoring or otherwise of Dahl’s children’s books has become a front in the culture wars (his rampant antisemitism, less so). It’s an area Kirkwood and Turner navigate elegantly. The witches are all female and all bald, but Luke’s gran is bald too.
The scariness of childhood and the fear of death are present and correct, as is an awareness of economic or social difference: posh boy and sugar-addict Bruno here gets a full, brilliant Broadway routine to himself, and becomes a great comic foil for Luke. The story has been carefully updated: the witches take selfies and complain that the prim, postwar outfits with which they disguise their clawed hands and square feet now look horribly passe.
Designer Lizzie Clachan gives us overarching talons, nightmare fantasies and box-of-tricks physical sets, but the show’s muted colour palette gets a bit boring. Standout songs include Luke’s Ready to Go, the Grand Witch’s insinuating hymn to childlessness Wouldn’t It Be Nice, Gran’s When I Was Young and the irresistible clap-along Get up, sung by Helga (Jersey Blu Georgia on opening night) and the younger cast members.
There are occasional lacunae here but this is a polished, witty, crisply sardonic serving of Dahl. And if the other child actors sharing the central roles are as good as the ones I saw, they deserve all the plaudits.
National Theatre, to January 27; book at ES Tickets
