The BFG at the RSC review – a gloriumptious stage version

Director Daniel Evans has dreamt for seven years of bringing The BFG to the stage. And every ounce of that huge ambition shows in this Royal Shakespeare Company production of Roald Dahl’s classic story. It is, as the Big Friendly Giant might himself announce, “wondercrump”.

The obvious issue – how do you create a giant in front of everyone’s eyes – has been solved in the most imaginative ways. There’s a certain amount of rough magic in methods that require the constant suspension of disbelief, creating multiple versions of the big man, his orphan friend Sophie (a spirited Ellemie Shivers on press night) and the even bigger and much badder giant Bloodbottle, who munches “human beans” and snatches poor “norphan” children from their beds.

The play, adapted by Tom Wells and Jenny Worton, opens with Sophie and her friend (a new character, Kimberley, played by Maisy Lee) in bed, as huge giant eyes sweep across Akhila Krishnan’s video projections. When the BFG snatches Sophie, John Leader, the actor playing him initially, carries a puppet Sophie, but is himself manipulated through the air by the shadowy puppeteers, so he seems to be moving at great pace. When he returns to Giant Country, he is a massive puppet and Sophie once more an actual child. When BloodBottle appears, he and Sophie are then puppets and Leader reverts to human form.

It sounds complicated, but the switches of scale work beautifully, providing constant changes of focus. Toby Olié’s puppets are familiar from his work on Spirited Away, with detailed heavy heads and arms, bodies and other limbs simply suggested. The voices come from within their square-jawed, moving mouths. They are deliberately unreal, but entirely convincing.

The BFG himself is a far cry from Quentin Blake’s pencil illustrations, a younger man in a leather jacket, more hobbit than giant, though he keeps his huge ears. Leader’s wide-eyed warmth is transferred to puppet persona; he is a very gentle giant indeed.

Designer Vicki Mortimer, costume designer Kinnetia Isidore, and lighting designer Zoe Spurr bind the entire world together in a flurry of different effects. All told, the designs are wonderful, with fine painted backcloths of London and Buckingham Palace, giving way to a vortex of spinning lines, and star-spattered blue when they go to catch dreams, all bright lights in bottles and whizzing whisps across the auditorium.

In general, the plot is a condensed version of the book. Yet the production team and adaptors have flung their own jokes and their own spin to the mix. Helena Lymbery’s Queen is conceived as somebody who longs for adventure, who wants to escape her lush, purple-curtained bed and security; the comic double act of Captain Smith (Philip Labey) and Captain Frith (Luke Sumner), who cannot be heard behind his bristling moustache, is an Operation Mincemeat-style parody of an over-protective and over-paranoid military. Their final appearance as tiny puppets, trying to tie down Richard Riddell’s furious Bloodbottle is a delight.

What the production misses is the pure glee of Dahl, his great jumps between the bone-crushing horror of the giants to his musing on the power of dreams to liberate and transform. Comparisons with the RSC’s globe-conquering hit Matilda are unfair but inevitable. This is a glorious show, fun for all the family, and it was noticeable how all ages found something to absorb them, but it doesn’t transport in quite the same way.

But then again, Dahl wrote the book in remembrance of his daughter Olivia, who had died 20 years previously. It is amongst his kindest books, with a genuinely happy ending. The RSC’s production absolutely honours that spirit with its love and care.