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Tall Stories’ stage version of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s classic kids’ picturebook ‘The Gruffalo’ is now something of a classic itself. First performed in 2001, it’s only a couple of years younger than the book, and is rarely off the UK stage, whether that’s on a national tour or settling in for its frequent West End runs.
And it remains fresh and charming, a piece of upbeat DIY theatre in which three performers (not the original three, of course) assume the roles of the various denizens of the Deep Dark Wood, into which the intrepid Mouse heads on a nut-finding expedition.
As is always the way with stage adaptations of picturebooks, the source material needs to be bulked out if you’re to get an hour’s show out of it. Toby Mitchell’s production opts to greatly expand the various hostile characters Mouse meets along the way: so Fox is now a gobby wideboy, Owl is a sort of mad flight lieutenant, and Snake is a preening Spaniard; each has a song in a reasonably appropriate musical style. Okay, some of it’s a bit off-piste and occasionally it even feels like it’s nakedly vamping for time. But it’s fun, and funny, and a fine testament to the power of the imagination: only the titular woods-dwelling beast has a costume that comes close to illustration from the book, and yet the audience is rapt.
And of course, spaced out though they now are, you do still get Donaldson’s gloriously ricocheting rhymes – the iconic central refrain (‘why didn’t you know/there’s no such thing as a gruffalo?’) is the preschoolers’ equivalent to the chorus of ‘My Way’, and after a little encouragement it’s bawled back at the cast with equal elan. While the book remains popular, so will this, and quite right too.