With Follies providing the perfect Christmas treat for grown ups in the National Theatre's biggest auditorium, there's now a major family show in the proscenium arch venue, the Lyttelton. It's Pinocchio, the classic story of a wooden puppet who faces many perils in his quest to become human.Although the original story was a big hit when originally written in 1881, most people know it from the 1940's Disney cartoon, which made the characters more likeable and introduced the world to some classic songs. Even if you haven't seen the film or read Pinocchio, you'll almost certainly know the tune of When You Wish Upon a Star, An Actors Life For Me and I've Got No Strings.
In this hybrid of film and novel, the playwright Dennis Kelly has combined well known elements from the movie with some of the darkness from the page, while Martin Lowe has adapted the cinema songs for the stage.
Staging all this is the job of some of the UK's hottest creative talents, including Tobi Ollie. A major part of the War Horse team (The National Theatre's last big puppetry hit) he designs the Pinocchio puppets, based on an aesthetic conceived by Bob Crowley.
In a clever reversal of our expectations, it is the human characters that are presented as towering puppets, while Pinocchio himself is winningly played by the flesh and blood Joe Idris-Roberts. This provides a wonderful distortion of scale and the actor really does look like a toy beside his father, his two kidnappers and the Blue Fairy, who engineers a happy ending for the child.
There are many beautiful visual effects throughout - from the tiny version of the fairy, like a little blue flame that flickers as if by magic through the auditorium, to the gigantic whale that appears out of the darkness to swallow our hero.
The artistry on display is brilliant, the plot is a traditional, fairy story quest for love and the Disney songs are as gorgeous as you remember from childhood. So... why is this production rather dull?
There are two major problems. The first is Kelly's wordy script, way too long winded for puppets to convey in the slow moving, opening scenes. The second is that the puppetry requires the stage to be swathed in blackness so that the colours pop out at you. Some comedy is bolted on, with Pinocchio's cricket friend and conscience portrayed as a loveable green bug with a modern OCD problem, but there's very little sense of watching a mischievous boy having fun.
All in all, it's a production to admire rather than fall in love with. It may well be the perfect Christmas treat for serious minded kids, but on the whole I suggest you take your younger family and friends to a good pantomime instead - they'll have a lot more fun.
A story of four unique same-sex relationships from across the ages, theatre company Forward Arena’s production is ambitious and undeniably fresh in its storytelling. We are greeted with a complete absence of set, which is necessary for a production that jumps time periods with almost every scene.