James and the Giant Peach
James and the Giant Peach, Cambridge Arts Theatre, Tuesday, October 29
It’s rather a struggle to explain just how utterly ingenious, mesmerising and giddily brilliant this production of James and the Giant Peach is.
The Birmingham Stage Company have done Roald Dahl’s tale of an orphan, a giant peach, a gaggle of seagulls and a motley collection of oversized insects, justice – and that’s saying something.
It pops with sound and colour, whip smart jokes and songs that soar and fizz, telling the story of James (Tom Gillies), who, after being orphaned by an escaped rhino, is sent to live with his two gruesome aunts, Spiker and Sponge. Cruel, self-obsessed and smelly to boot, they treat James like a slave until one day a wizened old man turns up with a bag of glowing crocodile tongues packed full of magic. James promptly trips and drops the lot and then something rather wonderful happens… the dried up old tree at the end of the garden sprouts a perfectly humungous peach.
By half time my brain was a-buzz, my mind agog and reeling with the pace of it. The cast, all dolled up in fabulous outfits (Centipede with his many legs, Spider looking oh so Parisian in a beret, Ladybird in polka dots and Grasshopper dapper in green), race around playing instruments live, and tumble about the set magnificently springing puppets, dipping into UV and singing away – the choreography is unreal.
Earthworm (Rhys Saunders) is hysterically morose, jiggling like a mad thing when used as bait for a horde of seagulls, while Gillies is suitably kind and thoughtful as James. But it’s the supporting cast of Giovanna Ryan and Oliver Lynes that look like they’re having the most fun. Lynes gets to run about as a set upon reporter (potato masher in hand as a mic); they don Victorian striped bathing suits and flippers, squawking and flapping with fluffy seagulls pinned to their heads, and slither and scoot around the stage as hungry sharks – they are the witty details that shimmer, shake and bring in most of the laughs (of which there are many).
The attention to detail is as perfect as the set is fantastical: there are no behind the scenes, everything from props to actors-in-waiting are disgorged, ready to leap into focus and brandish their magic, while the peach, well, we wouldn’t want to give it away, but it comes in a fair few guises and at one point is launched into the crowd….
Clever, bright and endlessly enchanting, the sinister edge that undercuts the book wriggles in, the darkness rubbing up against the lightness of escape and making new friends, but it’s funny (yes, being eaten by a rhino is rather hilarious), heartfelt and will leave you grinning manically.
What an adventure. I’d quite like to get caught up in it again.
First published by the Cambridge News.
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