An eerie and enchanting evening
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe West Yorkshire Playhouse
There are few better directors to take you by the hand through the wardrobe and into the icy, enchanted realm of Narnia than Sally Cookson. She’s like the Kitemark of vigorous, stripped-back adaptations of classic stories – Peter Pan, Jane Eyre,
Cinderella – a recognisable and entirely trustworthy symbol of bewitched and beautiful storytelling. I’m not sure Christmas would be the same without her.
With its multiple, mythical layers and other-worldly setting, CS Lewis’s Second World War story of the four evacuated Pevensie siblings stumbling into a world of endless winter plays to Cookson’s many strengths. Yet the most striking aspect of this production – playing out on a huge, in-the-round stage – is how simple it all is. Most of the props Cookson uses to conjure up the parallel worlds of Professor Kirke’s rambling country house and the frozen tundra of Narnia can be found lying around at home: tin cans, string, suitcases, etc. Ordinary bed sheets become swathes of snow. Bodies of characters who’ve been turned to stone by the White Witch twist on ropes, draped in plastic sheeting.
Cookson finds great dramatic and visual mileage in the darkness of the White Witch’s kingdom. As Lucy, Susan, Peter and the poor, unhappy, treacherous Edmund (each of them cheerily relatable rather than stuffy, and with local Leeds accents) make their various tentative ventures into this blasted realm, the atmosphere is austere, furtive, frightening. White snow creatures scuttle in shadows. The stage is like an iceberg, lit by spreading tentacles of white light. The White Witch’s army consists of nightmarish puppets on stilts, with skeletal, spectral bodies. And the White Witch herself? I’m not sure I’ve seen anything more bone-chilling in the theatre as the moment she ascends upwards at the end of the first act in a crack of thunder, and then whooshes back down at great speed, out of sight.
What’s missing is an understanding of Narnia as a place steeped in Creation mythology. Aslan, partly represented by a huge lion puppet, and otherwise played by Iain Johnstone, is an underwhelming presence (and in truth, never a real match for Carla Mendonca’s Witch).
Perhaps mindful of overcooking the Christian symbolism, Cookson plays down the moment of Asian’s sacrificial death but the result is to dilute a crucial moment in the story. The acoustics are also dodgy – Benji Bower’s folk score is wonderfully eerie, but sometimes at the expense of what the actors are saying.
Yet there is so much to enjoy here. The storytelling is swift and clear. The forest animals are a delight. There’s a foot-tapping, accordion-playing Father Christmas, a body-popping wolf and many moments of joyous audience participation. And, if the death of Aslan is squandered, Lewis’s themes of rebirth and the arrival of spring are not: the final scenes play out in a blast of hippyish sunshine and joy. Terrific.
Until Jan 27. Tickets: 0113 213 7700; wyp. org.uk