Creating super-sized grandmas and monster-truck chickens for George's Marvellous Medicine

I was so excited to be asked to design George’s Marvellous Medicine for Curve and Rose Theatre Kingston by Nikolai Foster and his team. I adored the book as a child, and remember attempting to mix my own potions from items I found around the house, as I expect many of us who grew up reading Dahl stories have.

I’ve designed a few children’s shows before, such as Room On The Broom, and The Christmasaurus. From these I have learnt that you shouldn’t patronise a young audience. You can really delve into your imagination to come up with design solutions and know the children will come along on the journey with you.

We visually wanted to reflect George’s anarchic nature and his incredible creativity

The stage adaptation of George’s Marvellous Medicine poses quite a few challenges for a designer to solve. Not only does George have to create two potions per show by collecting ingredients from various rooms, but we also need a number of farmyard animals of various shapes and sizes. Also, Grandma grows from her chair into the stratosphere after drinking the mixture. She then spends the majority of act two perched on top of the roof of George’s family home. Oh, and all of this is had to play in Curve’s Studio, before embarking on a three-month tour of proscenium houses, before being staged almost in the round at Rose Theatre Kingston.

Very early on, the director Julia Thomas and I both agreed we visually wanted to reflect not only George’s anarchic nature, but also his incredible creativity. After all, the medicine’s creation is his unique response to dealing with a nightmare Grandma, who has surprised his family by inviting herself to come to stay in the Kranky farmhouse.

A port-a-loo became a wallpapered bathroom, a trailer-truck stuck in the mud became George’s bedroom

Allowing ourselves this creative freedom, the piece eventually began to solve itself. We realised the rooms of the house could be created from items you’d typically find lying around a farmyard. A portable toilet became a vividly wallpapered bathroom, a trailer-truck stuck in the mud became George’s bedroom – and how about we thrust Grandma into the sky riding on the back of a forklift truck!? This recycled environment was also applied to the creation of the costumes, puppets and props. Our chickens are half chicken, half remote-controlled monster trucks, and a milking machine is a weird cow-printed contraption combining an exercise bike powered by a wind turbine hooked up to a milk-spewing water cooler. We then contained the whole set within the rim of the tin bath George uses to mix up his medicine – it seemed a great way to contain all of his bubbling energy. No mechanics were hidden, everything we use to tell this story is on display, it’s just that no element is used in the way you’d expect.

We both found our approach allowed us complete liberation, and it appears the absolute fun we had creating the piece has translated onto the stage.

George's Marvellous Medicine runs at Rose Theatre, Kingston until 7 April.