The BFG Review: A Lack of Confidence in RSC's Big Friendly Mashup
The Royal Shakespeare Company, named after its house dramatist, has been keeping afloat with the global hit Matilda: The Musical, premiering in Stratford-upon-Avon 15 winters ago. An adaptation of Roald Dahl's 1982 book about a counter-intuitive ogre who befriends an orphan, The BFG, is a hoped-for Christmas gift to the coffers of an organization facing budget-trimming job cuts. But, while Matilda was always a confident comedy musical, The BFG feels stylistically jumbled. Adapted by Tom Wells with additional material from dramaturg Jenny Worton, the show has a spoken drama strand, 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, where giants and "human beans" are choreographed to music with no lyrics. 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. Visually, the show plays with perspective, a Lilliputian to-and-fro, where the 12ft-high mechanical BFG looms over the human Sophie, but otherwise, the actor playing the giant, John Leader, towers above a tiny puppet Sophie.
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, and their excisions include a section about how humans of different nationalities taste to giants. The risk is to leave the residue with little tang at all.
The BFG is a co-production with Chichester Festival and Singapore Repertory theatres, and while it shows the RSC's artistic power, it doesn't feel like the giant hit its finances need. Audiences will have enough fun, but it's a missed opportunity for the RSC to showcase its full potential.
