Twisted Tales

There used to be a television series of Roald Dahl short stories called Tales of the Unexpected. Twisted Tales at the Lyric, Hammersmith, is much the same sort of thing, but without Ron Grainer’s eerie, unforgettable theme music or that strange gyrating model in muslin.

I’m not sure about this sudden new interest in theatrical horror stories: M R James, Dahl, Susan Hill – they’re all much better in print. And, I’m sorry, but Jeremy Dyson has an absolute duty to tell us which stories of Dahl he’s adapted; and why, and how, he’s cannibalised them.

There is a sort of narrative link with a young boy reading a book on a train with three strange men. One of them eventually shouts at another the night’s funniest line: “But my name is Fortescue, and I went to Eton,” (he drops dead).

But in Dahl’s brilliant, disparate style, each of these short stories has its own atmosphere: the necrophiliac landlady, and the avenging widow – who glories in her sudden ability to puff cigarette smoke over the disembodied, floating skull, and roving eye, of her husband in a basin – inhabit very different universes.

So the show makes little narrative sense, despite Polly Findlay’s adept production and the sterling work of Selina Griffiths – one of our top character actresses, and not just in Cranford on BBC TV – as both the sinister landlady and the liberated Mrs Pearl.

There is at least a floating eye to be proud of, though the theatrical representation cannot match the weirdness of Dahl’s prose. And when the landlady says that her two other lodgers haven’t left the house for years, it’s far too trite to have a cheap jibe about the stuffed parrot and the sleeping dog; the story is a mini-masterpiece of suspended animation – the play’s dumbed down.

Still, the audience has a fair old time and it’s possible they might have an even fairer one going back to look again at Dahl’s stories for adults; but the Lyric obviously isn’t matching the RSC in its all-conquering re-imagining of Dahl’s Matilda and her stroppy adventures.