Let’s hear it for Walliams
At the Bloomsbury Theatre doesn’t push boundaries – but, says that’s just fine
Barely had this enjoyable staging of Billionaire Boy ended than its author’s voice came purring over the tannoy. “Hello, this is David Walliams letting you know that my book Gangsta Granny will be staged in this very theatre! Granny can’t wait!”
You have to hand it to the former Little Britain star-turned-ubiquitous TV personality and prolific children’s author: one small but vital contributing factor to his remarkable success, with 32million copies of his books sold worldwide (entailing translation into 53 languages), is his unembarrassed willingness to push his products. When that production of Gangsta Granny premiered four Christmases ago, there he was on opening night, waving to fans. Walliams “gets” the age of constant connectivity – children want to know their authors care about them.
Next week sees the start of an arena tour for a new adaptation of Grandpa’s Great Escape (the hero’s Spitfire will take wing in Wembley Arena and elsewhere). At the RSC in Stratford the seasonal show is his first novel, The Boy in the Dress. As indicated in my three-star review it was, well, enjoyable if undemanding: “Robbie Williams hardly breaks new ground with his songs but it orchestrates a good mix of comedy, pathos and transgressive crossdressing. There’s no reason why the production shouldn’t head into town, although it might look like a poor relation to the superior Matilda.”
Attempts to dent or diminish Walliams’s success by pointing out the limitations of his output are doomed to be self-defeating. What’s interesting is where the appeal lies: how he has managed to conquer the bookshelf, the small-screen and now the stage with his work for children, having also probably introduced an entire generation to character comedy via Little Britain.
Yes, he’s a one-man productionline making the most of a winning formula – proffering old-fashioned storytelling with beginnings, middles and ends, goodies and baddies, often mixing in a moral: be true to yourself, considerate to the less fortunate and so on. What’s salient is that, as much as he has taken a leaf out of the books of Roald Dahl (even using the latter’s illustrator Quentin Blake for his first two novels), he has ingested Oscar Wilde’s maxim that “we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously”.
He knows how to do jokes, but he gets his hands dirty in the grub of childhood preoccupations and sharpened perceptions. It’s a world where tastes and smells – from the sweet shop to the school lavatories – abound and little things are magnified: who’s round the corner, the slights and shortcomings of relatives, unexpressed, simmering yearnings.
Where Walliams has an edge on rivals is that he is at once liberalminded and yet non-PC, which chimes with the tolerance yet unruliness of modern children. Fat for him is as funny as vanity is; conformity is the overriding enemy. There’s an honesty about how we navigate life: no one is going to drop a letter through your door inviting you to attend Hogwarts, but children are avid daydreamers.
What if, as in Billionaire Boy, your father was rich and made his money on the back of tarting up toilet-paper to freshen the public’s derrières? Ample opportunity flows for lavatory humour – indeed director-adapter Neal Foster and designer Jacqueline Trousdale concoct a palatial set from towers of stacked bog-rolls. But the rougher underside is felt too: money doesn’t buy you happiness, or friends. Switching to the local comp, Matthew Gordon’s lonely Joe finds that the new best buddy who made him feel like a million dollars has been paid for by his naff, more money-than-sense dad.
The pain that comes from alienation and loneliness laps at the edges of his books – Walliams knows how to allude to it, commodify it and hold it at bay. That restraint begets work you could dismiss as “middling” – never unleashing terrifying psychological demons. Yet while we obviously need work that pushes boundaries, there’s room too for something in-between, a kind of artistic halfway house. Enjoyable if undemanding, if done right, can be on the money.