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It still seems be pantomime season at the Lyric Hammersmith. First there was its actual 2016 panto, ‘Aladdin’, which ended its run a couple of weeks ago. And now we have a sort of panto-lite adaptation of ‘Fantastic Mr Fox’, Roald Dahl’s story about the escapades of a cocky fox and his woodland chums.
It’s odd for the edgy, avant-garde Lyric to put on two family shows on the trot, and I wonder if the show – from serious talents writer Sam Holcroft and director Maria Aberg, with songs by Arthur Darvill – was initially conceived as being a bit more out there than has proved the case. It is raucous, but in a fairly cosy way, and perhaps inevitably seems conventional next to Wes Anderson’s gloriously idiosyncratic film version.
Still, if you want a fresh dose of all-ages escapism to take the edge off 2017 then it’s is pretty charming. The one bit of full-on Dahl-ian grotesquery comes right at the start when a chorus of cheeping birds sing us in – only for one of them to be gunned down brutally by Farmer Bones (Richard Atwill, whose increasingly unhinged performance repeatedly steals the show). He’s the arch nemesis to Greg Barnett’s Mr Fox who is, if I’m honest, a bit of a douche – less charmingly arrogant than slightly unbearable.
But it’s Mr Fox’s idiosyncratic woodland crew who are the real heart of the show: Kelly Jackson’s Mouse, who gets furiously angry if anybody tries to touch her; Gruffudd Glyn’s geology nerd Mole; Raphael Bushay’s savant-ish Badger and Sandy Foster as a twitchy, nervy, somewhat insane Rabbit. The setpiece when they try – and hysterically fail – to raid a chicken farm is a delight. But it’s also the high point of a production that’s fun but restrained, never quite mad or weird enough to live up to either Dahl or the Lyric’s reputations.