Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales@The Lyric Theatre

'Enter a wonderfully dark and dangerous world where nothing is quite as it seems. Expect the unexpected with tales of sinister landladies, sweet revenge and gambling with the highest of stakes.'


Jeremy Dyson and Naomi Wilkinson have adapted and created a wonderful interpretation of Roald Dahl's short stories: The Landlady, William and Mary, Mrs Bixby and the Colonel 's Coat, Man from the South, and chilling 'Galloping Foxley'
    The fluent and imaginative set design by Naomi Wilkinson was the highlight. The entire stage could rotate. The Narrator (a young boy) and a train that moved from upstage to downstage and occasionally split in half, made each short story flow smoothly from one to the other. In The Landlady, it was the gauzy faint wallpaper drop that created a sense of a space, a room. In William and Mary, I particularly enjoyed the projected eye on a screen, not only did it help build upon the humour of the story, but it also involved the audience- as it reacted to Mary smoking her cigarette by dilating the audience laughed. In Mrs Bixby, the comical pawn broker traveling across stage using her feet behind the desk as Mrs Bixby moved around her again emphasised a sense of space and moving around it. It also became very comical to watch. 


Coincidentally, I had been reading the short stories and seeing some of them come alive on stage was fantastic.