DRINK DEEP OF GLORIUMPTIOUS FROBSCOTTLE
The RSC holiday season show offers a rising generation some proper theatrical wonder, away from banal screen CGI and avatar gaming – though it does use a modest share of projections from time to time. Children love home-made miracles and here are plenty: puppetry both vast and tiny, flying dreams made of light and blown into sleepers from a great horn, spectacular moments forcing you to see-yet-not-see the puppeteers. It’s Roald Dahl’s gentlest and least resentful story, about a girl’s friendship with a 25-ft giant. The Big Friendly Giant – BFG – means no harm but builds lovely dreams in his laboratory. He is routinely bullied by bigger, 50ft giants, with names like Bloodbottler, who prey on orphans. When he nervously kidnaps the firm-willed 8 year old Sophie by accident, he is persuaded to join her plot to give the Queen a nightmare which alerts her to use her power against the monsters.
It takes taste, tact and heart to put it on stage, and Tom Wells’ adaptation (directed by Daniel Evans and supreme puppetmeister/designer Toby Olie) achieves it. There is some slightly odd plotting in the first half when the Queen is suddenly introduced, delightfully surrounded by colourful footmen, without any warning mention of why; something which might baffle newcomers to the book who just want to know how Sophie is getting on. But never mind; it becomes clear.
And importantly, John Leader is glorious. He somehow has the perfect face for a simple-hearted giant, who trips over his words and invents grand new ones like wondercrump and gobblefunking; a chap often bullied, a bit nervous of being captured and put in a zoo, and who has never really had a friend. The immense puppet-head is beautifully like him, and elegant transitions from scale to scale mean we sometimes see the real John Leader with a tiny puppet Sophie, sometimes the towering puppet carrying or arguing with the real Sophie. The bad giants tower even higher, so of course there are moments in the later jeopardy when one of them, played real-actor-size by Richard Riddell (nicely thuggish), overshadows a puppet BFG as well as even smaller minipuppet humans. Anyway, it all works beautifully. The puppet operators are, rightly, given their full credits in the programme.
Sophie – on press night Ellemie Shivers – is a splendid part for a child RSC debut, being bespectacled, firmly prosaic, scornful of adult inadequacies and always determined (facing death, she shrugs “I”m eight, I’ve had a good innings” and later when the Queen’s fraught soldiers catch her “I’m not scared. It’s not my first kidnapping”.) She sees straight away that Leader’s sweet natured BFG with his uncertain, benign gestures and wobbling language is no problem but a chap who needs managing, so she does so. She is equally exasperated, as we are entertainingly forced to be, by the two khaki-clad military chiefs with asymmetric moustaches (providing a good ongoing joke) because they are obsessed with thinking everything (even a cake) is a dangerous international assassin in disguise. They panic when the thumping giant footsteps are heard and shut the Queen up against her will “It’s a panic room, ma’am” “Well, it’s working!”she snaps.
What was oddly and peculiarly touching was the handling of this Queen (played by Helena Lymbery with great spirit). She of course is the late Elizabeth II of Dahl’s 1975, in robust grey-permed middle age, a bit impatient with the butler and more so with the military. It had to be her, for the story; and watching Lymbery responding to the girl and her giant , bored with flummery and and staring down the bossy soldiers, I could only reflect that of course they couldn’t have moved the plot on to Charles and Camilla. `Elizabeth II may be gone but is still in our heads and instincts, a personality, a necessity, a reassurance. The Queen.
As it all resolves in happiness and a big breakfast (the BFG’s table is a billiard-table balanced on four grandfather clocks), there is the Dahl-invented outbreak of whizzpopper farting for all, and one rather sly joke. The thuggish giants are imprisoned on a diet of foul snozzcumbers, and told by HM “it’s not a forever home, just a hole in the ground while we work something out”. I know who that made me think about.
Rsc.org.uk. To. 7 feb
Rating 4
I
theatreCat 