The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Synopsis

When a game of hide and seek leads Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy through the wardrobe t a magical world, they think they've found the perfect place to escape a rainy day. But all is not well in the snowy land where the evil White Witch has condemned Narnia to eternal winter. Can the children unite with the majestic lion Aslan to defeat the Witch and fulfil their destiny on the thrones of Cair Paravel?

Our Review:

14 December 2004

WYP audiences have been spoilt, perhaps, by Little Shop of Horrors and The Wind in the Willows in the last two years, to expect glorious scenic extravagance in its Christmas offering for kids. So this year it seems a bit spartan.

With a couple of cut-off curved stairways going nowhere except around on revolves, and various spectral coat-shaped hangings sporadically filling space just for the sake of it. A downstage eye-in-the-sky roves left to right and back again reflecting projections also shown on a skew-whiff screen upstage - to very little purpose. It's all disappointingly pedestrian.

Adrian Mitchell's stage adaptation of the C S Lewis Christian allegory starts, properly enough, on a London railway station as four sibling youngsters are evacuated in the early 1940s to stay with the benevolent Professor Kirk and his austere below stairs staff. The Professor turns out to be appropriately doubled in the casting with Father Christmas, but other app...

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Latest User Review

195.93.34.13) - 17 December 2004:

In reply to LuluT, I did indeed read the programme, but that doesn't differentiate between who is present and who is not. (Not long ago the WYP claimed to have Patrick Stewart playing the Wizard of Oz - but he wasn't in the building except in electronic image.) On this occasion, after checking, I find I - in common with quite a few others - was wrong, and so I must apologise. Quite why a theatre brings live musicians into a theatre, then hides them completely from the audience, while piping their music into the auditorium, to the extent that even their curtain call is by electronic image on a screen, still eludes me....

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