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If the Stratford chapter of the Karl Marx Appreciation Society happened to be planning a jolly festive night at the theatre, they'd find themselves well satisfied by ‘Wind in the Wiltons’, a twenty-first-century London update on the riverbank classic that's full of the tumult of class struggle.
Kids author Piers Torday has made the dastardly weasels into vicious property developers who've smashed up poor Mole’s Hyde Park home to build a private road. The Wild Wood is a playground of villainous bankers, Badger is a seasoned leftwing activist who delivers Billy Bragg-esque protest songs, and Toad is told that he's a ‘victim of late-stage capitalism’, distracting himself from his inner emptiness with technological gimmickry like the Alexa-esque ToadBot. So not really a night of gentle rural escapism, then.
But in amongst all the cathartic anger, there's also a gentler thread, weaving through the thickets of political satire like a babbling woodland stream. Torday’s taken inspiration from the trippiest chapter in Kenneth Grahame's 1908 book, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, where Mole and Ratty have a vision of mysterious, benevolent nature god Pan, in a striking bit of paganism from an author who'd spent most of his life toiling in a bank in staid Victorian England.
It's in these moments that the aptly named Tom Piper’s magical set design comes into its own. Wilton’s artistically crumbling walls are decked with golden sheaves of wheat and an ingenious central tree whose leaves change with the passing seasons, all suffused with the warm glow of Zoe Spurr’s lighting.
This musical’s tone is an odd and perhaps not massively kid-friendly mix of bleak cynicism and folksy cosiness, and perhaps that split identity is best typified by composer Chris Warner's wildly varied songs. One minute, the cast are vamping their way through TikTok dance craze-inspired number ‘Sexy City Otter’, the next, they're singing and strumming their way through a gentle, catchy acoustic ode to the river it's sometimes easy to forget they all live on.
Director Elizabeth Freestone doesn't quite make this all feel coherent – her uneven production feels more at ease with the story's gentle environmental themes than with its edgier moments. Still, the cast give their all to pulling this show off. Rosie Wyatt and Corey Montague-Sholay have a winning chemistry as Ratty and Mole: I loved their trash-based riverside picnic together, where her enthusiasm for fried chicken scraps and discarded Pret sandwiches gradually overcomes his finicky ways. Darrell Brockis plays the drone-flying Toad with a wonderfully thespy, bratty vigour that would work equally well in a more traditional production, and Melody Brown has just the right mix of ‘to the barricades’ fearsomeness and warmth as grizzled old Badger.
‘Wind in the Wiltons’ makes modern London look so awful that its happy ending feels less than fully convincing – but it also shows the power of community in a grim landscape, striking a note of seasonal goodwill that’s just enough to send you singing as well as raging into the night.