Little scamps need a smaller stage
The Midnight Gang (Festival Theatre, Chichester) Verdict: Slim plot, sturdy characters HHH✩✩
PLOT is not David Walliams’s strong suit, but usually, he charms with his characters. Bryony Lavery’s stage adaptation of his 2016 children’s story, set in a dysfunctional hospital, is a case in point.
In a long first half our hero, Tom, is admitted to hospital with an egg-sized lump on his head from a cricket ball.
Barring a brisk, imaginary trip to Antarctica, the main event is a 90-yearold lady flying naked over London.
What Lavery bottles best are Walliams’s characters. His children in the titular gang — who break out of hospital for nocturnal larks — include a would-be female explorer, a blind boy who longs to conduct orchestras, a lad who wants to fly and Tom, who’s been abandoned by his parents. Most affecting is Anjali Shah as a girl who seems to be having chemotherapy and gets the one tear-jerking tune in Joe Stilgoe’s jaunty score as she pines for school: ‘Everything’s exciting when you’ve got no place to go.’
The adults, meanwhile, are a hearty set of Walliams-ish caricatures. Jennie Dale plays a saucily domineering matron reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s Miss Trunchbull. Marilyn Cutts plays the flying Granny who thinks she’s six. And Tim Mahendran is Tom’s old-fashioned, cane-flexing headmaster.
Lucy Vandi is almost pantomimish as a soul-singing dinner lady. And, in a nicely sentimental touch, the show’s saviour turns out to be Dickon Gough’s kindly hunchbacked porter, who aids and abets the kids in their adventures.
Dale Rooks’s direction strives to fill the capacious stage with Simon Higlett’s set, with its gothic masonry and hydraulic platform bringing up the basement and glass atrium.
Stilgoe’s score is more cheerful than memorable, padding out the story rather than amplifying it.
None of which means the show isn’t thoroughly likeable. Just that it might have been better, scaled down and served up on a smaller stage.