When directing a show, it can be much harder to hit the right tone than it looks. Even when a work sets out to be unsettling, it needs to unsettle in a way that draws the audience in rather than putting us off.  In this respect, John Tiffany’s production of this adaptation from Roald Dahl’s children’s book looks not so much like a misfire as an outright failure.

The book has been “mischievously adapted” by Enda Walsh. Mischief isn’t necessarily a word to associate with Walsh, who has in general taken on the mantle of Samuel Beckett in writing a succession of works about existential futility, and it sits self-consciously on his shoulders here. Dahl’s brief original story mentions only the repulsive Mr and Mrs Twit tormenting each other and the eventual escape of their captive family of caged monkeys. Walsh makes the monkeys almost a family of bards, and gives Amiee-Ffion Edwards as Monkey Daughter a cheeky cross-species love interest. He also adds a clutch of additional characters and an entire plot. Now, the loathsome sadists (played by Jason Watkins and Monica Dolan) engage in psychologically torturing a trio of carnival folk whose fairground the Twits defrauded them of years ago. He has also more or less invented a moral for the tale: the crucial importance of community and co-operation in overcoming greed and selfishness. Which would be fine, if he could b ring himself to take it seriously. But he insists on caricaturing the message, as if to prove his own cleverness. (An exhortatory monkey-speech straight to audience? Ending on a saccharine rendition of “Morning Has Broken”? Really?) This turns the play – however inadvertently – into a counsel of despair and futility.

As the piece feels, so it looks and moves. Chloe Lamford’s set design is impressive in terms of complexity and detail, but it has a painstaking squalor which is enough to feel unpleasant but not gross enough to make a point out of it. Similarly, under John Tiffany’s direction and that of his movement associate Steven Hoggett, the physical business lurches and spasms where it needs to career; it’s particularly unsatisfying to see as talented a comic performer as Watkins so underused. The Court are marketing this as a family show for 8-year-olds and above; where Dahl’s genius was in talking to children as equals, this production alternately talks down to them and past them (as evidenced by the press-night youngsters’ response, or lack of it), and largely past the rest of us and its own intentions too.
  
Written for the Financial Times.