The Royal Shakespeare Company is named for its house dramatist but – since its global hit Matilda: The Musical premiered in Stratford-upon-Avon 15 winters ago – Roald Dahl has helped keep it solvent enough to do Shakespeare. An adaptation of Dahl’s 1982 book about a counter-intuitive ogre who befriends an orphan is a hoped-for Christmas gift to the coffers of an organisation making budget-trimming job cuts.
But, where Matilda was always confidently a comedy musical, The BFG feels stylistically to be juggling different shows. Adapted by Tom Wells with additional material from dramaturg Jenny Worton, the show has a strand of spoken drama, somewhat reminiscent of Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I, with a quasi-Elizabeth II, sweetly played by Helena Lymbery, saving the nation with child superhero helpers.
A second element is a sort of puppet ballet (mannequin designer and director Toby Olié) where giants and “human beans” are choreographed to music with no lyrics. Blame Matilda but I had to fight the expectation or hope that the characters would sing; sometimes a line of dialogue, such as the need to dream big, seems so clearly to cue a number that we can almost hear it.
Visually, the show plays with perspective, a Lilliputian to-and-fro in which sometimes the 12ft-high mechanical BFG looms over the human Sophie (Ellemie Shivers on press night) but otherwise the actor playing the giant, John Leader, towers above a tiny puppet Sophie. There seems, though, no clear logic to why either main character is big/small or flesh/fabric at any moment other than that the alternative featured in the previous scene.
Dahl’s work became the subject of contention in 2023 when Puffin Books released expurgated editions removing language and attitudes considered offensively dated. After a public row, the first versions continued to be published, as The Roald Dahl Classic Collection, alongside the cleansed texts, effectively giving the RSC the choice of two books to stage.
Readers of sanitised rather than legacy texts are more likely to recognise Wells’ and Worton’s work. Their excisions include a section about how humans of different nationalities taste to giants. Bad taste is such a part of Dahl that the risk is to leave the residue with little tang at all.
The performers are impeccable under the direction of RSC co-head Daniel Evans. Yet with the BFG and baddie giant Bloodbottler divided between an actor, a puppet and four on-stage puppeteers, coherent characterisation can be lost; Paddington: The Musical more seamlessly combines acting, animatronics and voices projected from backstage.
Showing the complexities of theatrical funding now, The BFG is a co-production with theatres in Chichester and Singapore. Audiences will have enough fun but, while intermittently showing the RSC’s artistic power, this sadly doesn’t feel like the giant hit its finances need.
• At Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 7 February. Then at Chichester Festival theatre, 9 March-11 April
