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James and the Giant Peach
West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds
5 stars
IF JEFFERSON AIRPLANE had staged a theatre show it would have been James and the Giant Peach.
David Woods’s new family adaptation is a wonderfully trippy affair that teases out the psychedelia in Roald Dahl’s 1961 book.
Set in a glorious world of oranges and browns, the inside of the peach has been fashioned into a hippy’s delight.
Its giant stone is a swing chair, the old man who gives James (Chris Lew Kum Hoi) a magical sack of tiny glowing crocodile tongues is an acid-trip veteran and the legs of Centipede (Paksie Vernon) are fashioned from the fringes of a vintage jacket.
That warm and cosy environment contrasts with the monochrome world of aunts Spiker and Sponge (Jess Murphy and Beverly Rudd), whose spitefulness is viscerally demonstrated when the former stubs out a cigarette on James’s hand and the latter rips off his teddy bear’s head with her teeth.
Yet the cruelty of this adult world is continually deflected by moments of black humour — a rhino belches just after mowing down James’s parents and a life-size sticker of the aunts is peeled off the floor when they get flattened by the peach.
The humour — aimed at children aged six and above — is balanced with just the right amount of interaction, with them invited onstage at one point for a closer look at the peach and at another it’s passed like an inflatable beach ball over the heads of the audience.
Such simple props stimulate the imagination — a shark is shaped from saws and a deckchair, seagulls from matched pairs of flippers and the set itself is framed within sheets of cardboard, making it look like it’s burst out of James’s box of belongings.
As well as expertly manipulating the props, the seven-strong cast take on multiple roles and play a variety of instruments during the musical passages.
Each perfectly captures the essence of childhood or garden bugs, with Grasshopper (Robert Pickavance) a joy as he continually hops from foot to foot.
Such strong performances and the staging make for what can only be described as a real peach of a show.
Runs until January 24, box office: wyp.org.uk
