Though fans of the Lyric’s ‘Ghost Stories’ needn’t quite expect déjà vu, ‘Roald Dahl’s Twisted Tales’ certainly makes it clear that writer Jeremy Dyson has hit upon a distinct formula. Both productions are slick, interval-free affairs in which a series of dark vignettes are rattled off at speed, abetted by a highly mobile set, lashings of grotesque humour and a framing narrative that offers a sense of coherency to matters. And like ‘Ghost Stories’, ‘…Twisted Tales’ is a thoroughly entertianing show. But there’s a sense of diminishing returns here.
Director Polly Findlay keeps everything moving with technical precision and black-hearted gusto, but she hasn’t really imposed herself on a piece that’s very stylistically redolent of ‘Ghost Stories’. Neither, in a way, is the presence of Roald Dahl as strongly felt as it should be. The show is culled from his adult short stories and individually the tales are compelling, painting Dahl as an urbane but enjoyably cruel observer of human foibles.
The first vignette, in which a naive young office worker checks into a macabre B&B, is wholly predictable, yet that’s sort of the point: it’s just 15 minutes of an everyman sliding towards certain doom, and it’s a great, malevolent lark. And while there’s a sense of justice to the sketch in which a dying husband is taunted by his put-upon wife, it’s the retina-scorchingly OTT manner of his humbling that makes the story so queasily satisfying.
But where ‘Ghost Stories’ had an overall point – deconstructing the concept of the scare – ‘…Twisted Tales’ doesn’t do a lot as a whole; it’s excessively episodic, with a weak framing story. Good fun, but the ‘Ghost Stories’ formula has been trotted out a little too readily; the night feels like a more perfunctory celebration of Dahl’s writing than it really ought to be.