Review

The Witches, National Theatre, review: Roald Dahl's classic is given a magical - if sanitised - makeover

3/5

The National Theatre's big Christmas production is charmingly exuberant - but oddly light on drama

The Witches, at the National Theatre
The Witches, at the National Theatre Credit: Marc Brenner

Every Christmas the National surely prays that down the chimney will come a coffer-filling family friendly smash-hit to match the RSC’s Matilda. 

Over the past decade, whether it be The Light Princess, Pinocchio, or last year’s Hex the results have been mixed and that super-handy long-runner has proved elusive. Now, granted creative access to another of Roald Dahl’s best-loved, if more contentious books – 1983’s The Witches – the NT must be hoping it has struck gold with its little-expense-spared musical version, for which top-price tickets are £99.

As adapted by Lucy Kirkwood, the evening certainly offers a capering contrast to her last work here, pre-pandemic: the dour portrait of 18th-century women’s lives The Welkin, albeit with an element of continuity in foregrounding age-old fears about female power. The most glaring point of distinction, however, with that play, and also Matilda, is that instead of privileging a female narrative, in The Witches we get the journey of an orphaned young boy, here named (as in the 1990 film) Luke.

He’s told about the covens lurking in every land by his Norwegian gran, a witchy plot to mass-eliminate children by poisoned sweets (that turn them into slayable rodents) uncovered in a genteel south coast hotel.

Despite the care and ingenuity that Kirkwood and team (American composer Dave Malloy, director Lyndsey Turner, and choreographer Stephen Mear) lavish on Dahl’s mock cautionary tale about the danger of trusting kind, conformist-seeming women, there’s no getting round the fact that the boy’s psychological progress is slight. So the stereotyping of adult female duplicity inevitably dominates. The opening number, which has a troupe of ladies hymning the joys of domesticity (“We do yoga and Pilates/ And do the washing-up at parties the washing after parties”) before revealing snarling alter-egos, enjoyably makes a point that’s rehashed to diminishing effect.

William Skinner (Bruno) and Vishal Soni (Luke) in The Witches, at the National Theatre Credit: Marc Brenner

Some have accused The Witches of being misogynistic. It’s not so much that its slant feels hugely problematic here, more that it’s not massively dramatic. My biggest concern was what the author himself might have made of an extravaganza which has kids chirpily singing inside packing cases and belting out a number as cute as anything in Nativity; it’s not that there’s never a Dahl moment, but even so there’s much sanitisation.

Still, I risk over-quibbling about a show that, for sheer exuberance and coherence, has the edge on the RSC’s festive offering (The Box of Delights). There are songs, scenes and performances that please – a lovely note of comic darkness ushered in by Daniel Rigby’s maniacal hotelier Mr Stringer, much eccentric lovability from Sally Ann Triplett as Gran, and Katherine Kingsley as the glowering Grand High Witch gets a sharp-tongued solo about the joy of jettisoning child-care.

On opening night, it was hard to fault the nippers, too: with terrific work from Bertie Caplan as the irrepressible Luke, and a formidably assured turn from Cian Eagle-Service as Bruno, a sweet-toothed posh-boy and proto ladies’ man who gets a tap-dancing sugar-rush of a show-stopper. Fun enough for the festive season, but I can’t say I was fully bewitched.


Until Jan 27. Tickets: nationaltheatre.org.uk/