Theatre 1
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford)
Magical journey
Patrick Carnegy
The RSC must have known it was on to a winner when Peter Mandelson, Geri Halliwell and Liam Gallagher all named C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as their favourite children's book. What kind of nostalgia is the common comforter here? It's a trip back to the world of ration-books, grey flannel shorts and Brylcreemed hair.
Four war-evacuee children stumble through a wardrobe into the White Witch's domain where it's always winter and never Christmas. The bright side is the return of the great lion Aslan who, by giving up his own life, brings about the destruction of the Witch and the restoration of spring, Christ- mas and new life for all. Lewis would have been sagely pleased by the show of Aslan's continuing efficacy in Fidel Castro's recent resurrection of Christmas in Cuba.
There's been no shortage of previous dramatisations and Adrian Mitchell's new version is as skilled as any. It's faithful to Lewis but eliminates something of his avuncular archness. His dialogue offers more opportunities for laughs than are taken by the director Adrian Noble and his cast, though doubtless it's to their credit that they skate successfully over the thin ice of raising inappropriate mirth.
Mitchell dissolves Lewis's portentous lit- tle profundities into crisply singable lyrics, relished by the more forthright performers like Geoffrey Freshwater's Mr Beaver and Sevan Stephan's Lion but, as yet, too tame- ly sung by the rest of the cast. These song- and-dance routines are welcome punctuations in the action, translating it on to the fantastical plane where it best thrives. Shaun Davey's music, played by a 15-piece invisible band, is in the approved style of Les Mis., serviceable but scarcely memorable. The magical scenic transfor- mations through the wardrobe into Narnia are by Anthony Ward, who also does a nice line in costumes and visual jokes.
The out-and-out comedy scenes play best, none better than Mr and Mrs Beaver's tea-party with the fresh trout that's the specialite de la maison flying around all over the place and a hilarious stomping dance. This is a stuff-your-face feast as every child would have it, absolute- ly no manners until the end when everyone mops up while Beaver helps himself to one for the road.
Estelle Kohler as the Witch is a magnifi- cently feline figure in her white furs, evi- dently not averse to her wolf-bodyguards' slavering attentions as lovers. She declaims her lines in the grand theatrical manner, moves with sinuous elegance and wields the wand and the dagger with equal facility. The reindeer drawing her sleigh take an insolent interest in her conjurations and are particularly put out not to be offered a morsel of Edmund's Turkish Delight.
On the sunny other side, Patrice Naiambana was an impressive Aslan, proud of bearing, sinewy of limb and finding the right enigmatic blend of benevolence, humour and mystery. He was shorn and done to death by sundry ogres and hags in a Carmina Burana-inspired dance. The fights, too, were spectacular but too often the production drew back from delivering the kind of theatrical terror for which chil- dren thirst (and know how to take, as Roald Dahl's popularity proves). The amplified roar which came over the great lion from time to time was a feeble affair and the sound-effects ill-co-ordinated.
The children, always the most vulnerable part of this kind of show, are played by actors fresh from drama school, an accom- plished and well-characterised quartet, with Rebecca Clarke's charming Lucy and William Mannering's Edmund outstanding among them. They give convincing por- traits of the kind of alarmingly self-confi- dent and articulate Betjemanesque child that's gone for good, well, nearly. The land of Narnia and the jurisdiction of nanny have to be one and the same. Heaven only knows what the street-wise children in the audience made of them — doubtless crea- tures as fantastical as the centaurs and uni- corns peopling the stage.
The Professor in loco parentis looked like an Oxonian Dr Freud in tweeds. Mercifully he's not in the business of analysis, but rather that of 'Wonders. Yes. I'm working on wonders', a study that surely qualifies him for the Koestler chair in ESP. His mes- sage is that whatever you can imagine must be good for you and anyone questioning this should 'mind their own business'. All the dismal stuff about 'once a king in Narnia, always a king in Narnia' is happily forgotten in a joyous choral finale.
It remains curious that the lyricist of the Marat/Sade has left intact the cosiness at the heart of Lewis's work. It just shows what a softening has set in from the Sixties to the Nineties. I have to confess to a yen for a production with designs by Scarfe, music by Birtwistle, in which Nelson Man- dela would play Aslan, Geri Halliwell Lucy, Liam Gallagher a wolf and Peter Mandel- son the chief of the secret police, though maybe on balance he'd prefer the White Witch. Then the skeletons would really begin to dance in the wardrobe.
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