The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe came to Nottingham's Theatre Royal this week, bringing dazzling theatrics, humour and heart...
There are theatre productions which tell good stories, and then there are ones which utterly mesmerise. If you are looking for a fix of magical stagecraft and happen to catch The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe in Nottingham this week, you are in luck. Not quite a festive story, nor purely fantasy or drama, this production was the ideal dose of spellbinding escapist theatre for a stormy November night.
This particular production, brought to us by director Michael Fentiman, celebrates the 75th anniversary of the classic C.S. Lewis’s novel which was first published in October 1950. Since then, the novel has been translated into over sixty languages and sold more than 85 million copies. Originally a West End show, this particular edition began touring a year ago, and manages to inject the story with funny, magical, and spine tingling moments even beyond the perfection of the original tale.
As we took our seats, a pianist dressed in WWII attire played on the elegant Theatre Royal stage, setting the tone already for the next two hours. The tale kicked off with the Pevensie children being evacuated to Scotland, a supporting cast of dancers and musicians filled the stage, cleverly using a number of lit up suitcases and a small train to represent the journey, while lights flickered to draw us in to the feeling of anxiety of being transported to a new and unfamiliar place. The expertly crafted prop and stage design throughout were some of the best I have ever seen, with more modern technology and surrealist elements blended seamlessly with flickers of 1940s design and iconography.
At the house of Professor Digory Kirke, tensions settle with some laugh-out-loud humour around a particularly bedraggled cat, and we get to know the Pevensie children better (played by Joanna Adaran, Jesse Dunbar, Kudzai Mangombe and Bunmi Osadolor) as they explore the house and its secrets. Each of these young actors did a great job of embodying the characters, with Bunmi Osadolor's perfectly petulant Edmund, and Kudzai Mangombe's Lucy carrying just the kind of innocence we felt reading about her as children.
Katy Stephens as Jadis showed stage acting at its best; malevolently dreadful and beautifully statuesque, she brought a truly immense presence throughout
Soon, the children reach Narnia, where we meet Mr Tumnus, Mr and Mrs Beaver, and, quite frankly, the best and wildest version of Santa I've ever come across. They are joined by a motley crew of folksy woodland animals, who play a fantastic assortment of musical instruments, and make up the ‘resistance’ against the White Witch. (My companion and I agreed after it looked like a terribly inviting team of rebels.)
There were some brilliant characters, but Katy Stephens as Jadis, the White Witch, showed stage acting at its best; malevolently dreadful and beautifully statuesque, she brought an immense presence throughout, whether that be in spellbinding moments like a preternatural ascent from the stage, or in the fix of her heartbreakingly callous expression. While there was warmth and hope in the trustiness of the woodland gang, Jadis’ menagerie of minions were disturbingly fearsome, with wolves, masks, snarls, leather and caging making their hostility palpable.
Then, of course, we meet Aslan. Through the puppetry of Toby Olié, whose previous work include War Horse, the nobility of the lion was beautifully reflected in his smooth and graceful form, while the lion's humanity was brought to life in synchronicity by accompanying actor Stanton Wright.
Like many, this was a book series I devoured as a child, so the nostalgia was high, but I truly wasn't expecting a show of this proportion. As a story so well known throughout generations, it could easily have been produced as a play for a mere nostalgia kick, yet this production was full of surprises, reminding me why I need to be in the theatre more often. If the digital world is telling us A.I. is the future, this performance was the remedy; music, theatrics and enchantment before our very eyes, making us guess and wonder and what we were seeing before us.
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is at Theatre Royal until Saturday 8 November.
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