Roald Dahl probably didn’t have stage adaptation in mind when he published his much-loved children’s story “The BFG” in 1982. The titular “big friendly giant” — an endearingly inarticulate vegetarian who spends his nights dispensing happy dreams to sleeping children through a magical “dream blower” — is 30 feet tall. And his antagonists, a posse of meatheads intent on devouring as many “human beans” as possible, are almost twice his height.
Given the limits of human physiology, this presents something of a conundrum when it comes to dramatization. A 2016 movie version by Steven Spielberg used CGI to circumvent the problem, but that’s not really an option in theater. A new stage adaptation by the Royal Shakespeare Company, produced in collaboration with theaters in Chichester, England, and in Singapore, harnesses a much older technology to bring Dahl’s tale to life.
In “The BFG” — adapted by Tom Wells and Jenny Worton, directed by Daniel Evans, and running at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon through Feb. 7 — the giants are played by vast puppets, each of which is manipulated by several onstage puppeteers and voiced by an actor. In an inventive twist, these puppets are intermittently swapped out for human actors — John Leader as the BFG, Richard Riddell as the villain in chief, the Bloodbottler — whereupon the non-giant characters are substituted by Lilliputian marionettes, to maintain an appropriate sense of scale.
The production makes a virtue of necessity, turning the logistical constraints of staging into a source of fun; the regular inversions of human and puppet provide a baseline of mirth in a show suffused with pantomime spirit.
Leader, sporting outsized prosthetic ears, plays the title character as a lovable young simpleton. Speaking in a plaintive whine at all times, he recalls those exaggeratedly hapless entertainers who emcee at children’s parties.
It falls to the 8-year-old orphan Sophie, played winningly by young Ellemie Shivers, to take him in hand. Sophie is a bit of a bossy-boots, and surprisingly unsentimental for her age. (When, in their very first encounter, she erroneously assumes that he’s going to eat her, she declares phlegmatically: “I’m 8, I’ve had a good innings.”) But her friendship with the BFG inspires her to embrace the transformative power of dreams, and she conceives an ingenious plan to alert the Queen of England (Helena Lymbery) to the threat that the non-friendly giants pose.
Puppets aside, there is plenty of stimulation here for younger theatergoers. The BFG’s dream lab, stocked with jars of luminous potions; the infamous snozzcumber, a foul-tasting hybrid vegetable on which the BFG subsists; and his trusty dream blower, a long, thin, trumpet-like device, are all smartly realized by the Royal Shakespeare Company’s reliably detail-oriented props department. And the action is frequently boisterous, including a choreographed slow-motion fistfight between the Bloodbottler and his cronies, complete with cartoon sound effects, and a long routine involving flatulence.
At the premiere last week, it was neither Sophie nor the giants who got the biggest laughs, but the Queen’s overzealous, preposterously mustachioed military chiefs, Captains Smith and Frith (Philip Labey and Luke Sumner). Their bumbling antics inject a knockabout energy into the story’s delightfully outlandish climax, in which Queen Elizabeth II personally leads the charge against the Bloodbottler’s band, so that the British state saves the day.
Lymbery is the star of the play’s closing section, although her diction is more reminiscent of a suburban headmistress than the departed monarch. The idea of Her Majesty conducting a military raid in a helicopter, as she does here, would have been far-fetched in 1982, but it will seem doubly bonkers to younger audiences today, whose only memories of her would be as a nonagenarian.
Though the pantomime vibe feels apt as Britain enters the festive season, it flattens the wonder of the encounter between Sophie and the BFG. For generations of readers, the giant was synonymous with the charming line drawings of Dahl’s illustrator, Quentin Blake, who depicted him as an avuncular old man with a receding hairline. As children, we projected a lot onto those images, and much of the story’s mystery was bound up in the stark difference between its two protagonists. The fresh-faced Leader and his puppet iteration are a touch too disarmingly childlike in both appearance and demeanor. This doesn’t ruin the magic, but it does diminish it.
Played as a caper, “The BFG” makes for a pleasant evening of family entertainment — but on the page, it was something more. Perhaps that wonder is destined to live in the mind’s eye.
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