Theatre review: The BFG

As regular readers will both know, Roald Dahl's children's fiction was never part of my childhood (I mainly knew him for Tales of the Unexpected and as Britain's second favourite comedy bigot after Alf Garnett,) so going to Stratford-upon-Avon for The RSC BFG at the RST wasn't particularly on my to-do list until it turned out Tom Wells was on writing duty. And while he doesn't give the Big Friendly Giant quite the level of double entendre filth he used to bring to the Lyric Hammersmith pantos, there's still a trademark wit - I did like a small girl wearily accepting her fate as a giant's dinner with "well, I'm eight, I've had a good innings." Sophie (Martha Bailey Vine, Elsie Laslett or Ellemie Shivers) and Kimberley (Maisy Lee, Charlotte Jones or Uma Patel) live together in an orphanage until the former is abducted by a giant.

John Leader's BFG is an awkward, nervous creature with oversized ears and the vocabulary of Jar Jar Binks, small by the standards of other giants and opposed to their diet of human children, who's taken Sophie to the giants' world because he's worried she'll reveal his existence to the world.

In fact once the other giants decide to raid London the plan changes to warn the humans: The BFG has power to give people dreams, and they will use it to subliminally tell the Queen (Helena Lymbery) to save the day, and also to shop at Sainsbury's. Daniel Evans' production is comparatively simple, with the main visual bells and whistles coming from Toby Olié's puppets, and the way the production plays with the characters' relative scale.

So some of the time the Sophie actress (for a company that's made so much of its budget from child actors the RSC never seem too bothered about crediting which of them actually appears on stage at any given time) is on stage with a huge BFG, operated by a team of puppeteers including the ubiquitous Ben Thompson. At others Leader himself appears with a tiny Sophie doll, the giant seeming tiny himself compared to the others of his race, particularly the bully Bloodbottler (Richard Riddell.)

This is much gentler fare than most Dahl adaptations and doesn't quite have that edge of wickedness that he's most associated with - the closest thing to scandalising the kids is the Queen leading the cast in a musical fart-off (still, more appropriate than the last time I saw Lymbery play the Queen, when she did an interpretative dance about cum.) Sargon Yelda is a steadying presence among the silliness as royal butler Tibbs, while Philip Labey and Luke Sumner's army captains are more ridiculous the harder they try to seem in control. There's some lovely moments of music from Oleta Haffner with choreography from Ira Mandela Siobhan, all adding up to a show with a lot of individual charming elements - but one that always feels just slightly to be holding back.

The BFG by Tom Wells, based on the book by Roald Dahl, is booking until the 7th of February at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon; then continuing on tour to Chichester and Singapore.

Running time: 2 hours including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.