A BEAR WHO DESERVES HIS STATION
This could have been awful , a desecration of the children’s favourite which became a national icon of reassurance when he sat down to tea with the late Queen. But Jessica Swale’s book, tweaked from the originals and the first film, full of self-referential jokes, and larded with Christmas jokes (“I’m a taxi driver not a taxidermist!” , is teamed with songs by Tom Fletcher of McFly. And the whole is held as firmly as any beloved old teddy by Luke Sheppard’s fast, mischievous direction. He is not known for musicals, except Starlight Express at Wembley, but knows absolutely what to do: keep it moving, keep it singing and larking around with dance and slapdash on a stage massed with objects (Mr Gruber’s curio shop) and zap us with spectacular projections by Tom Pye of Totoro fame. Make you think it might go wrong, but never let it…
But you want to know about the bear? It is beyond brilliant. I suspended all disbelief. Of course a 3 ft 6 bear can talk and sing. He is in fact Arti Shah (or an alternate Abbie Purvis) in a bear-suit, deploying – this is real skill -wonderfully expressive body-language from mischief to hard stare to worried pathos. But his head and jaws are being operated by remote puppetry from offstage by the singer, James Hameed (or Ali Sarebani) who at first appears just behind the bear, as a baffled scruffy arrival at Paddington: it is, after all, a refugee tale. The result of performance and puppetry is complete suspension of doubt. You love him and believe him. Seriously. The puppetry is immaculate.
As to the songs, they rock along: the Don’t Touch That is masterful slapstick as the bear wrecks half the house and the set dangles a bathtub through the ceiling and Adrian der Gregorian as Mr Brown panics; Victoria Hamilton-Barritt deploys fabulous contralto evil as the predatory taxidermist with her “pretty little dead things” (is this going to put children off the Natural History Museum?) and in the second half the Marmalade song is a wonder of singalong enthusiasm.
Plenty of laughs: Bonnie Langford in her seventies is a perfect sassy old Mrs Bird, splits and cartwheel and all, and Tom Edden as a repentant Mr Curry handles drop-dead ironic lines like “to make Paddington into a tourist attraction? Who would DO that?” Perfect. The only flaw in the whole thing is perhaps the “Geographers’ Guild” idea and numbers, with a shrilly woke passage decrying museum collections – “leave things where they ought to be”. Which is a bit rich when you’re celebrating putting a wild Peruvian bear in a blue duffle-coat….
But that’s the only culpable silliness which knocks off a fifth star. It’s a blast.
thesavoytheatre.com to end of 2026 and probably almost forever…
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