A slate of Roald Dahl adaptations has been announced, including a family musical based on The Enormous Crocodile, a reading of The Magic Finger and a large-scale circus show featuring many of the author’s most famous characters.
The three shows will join the new musical The Witches, co-produced by the National Theatre and readying for its debut in November, while a further four creations have been commissioned by the theatre division of the Roald Dahl Story Company and are under development.
The Enormous Crocodile The Musical will be co-produced with Leeds Playhouse and Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre and will follow the story of a giant crocodile who likes to eat children for fun. Global contemporary music and puppetry will be at the heart of the production, inspired by the original picture book by Dahl.
The Magic Finger is about a young girl who can shoot a beam of electrical energy from her finger. With the help of the Unicorn Theatre, the story will be turned into a dramatic reading aimed at schoolchildren and families.
The large-scale circus, meanwhile, has been inspired by a variety of Dahl’s stories, and will be created by the award-winning director Polly Findlay.
The news follows controversy over the author’s books, after it was revealed that hundreds of changes had been made to his original texts in order to remove language deemed inappropriate. These included many descriptions relating to weight, mental health and gender – which some say are not suitable for young readers.
For example, in The Twits, Mrs Twit is no longer “ugly and beastly” but just “beastly”, and in James and the Giant Peach, Aunt Sponge is no longer “terrifically fat / And tremendously flabby at that”, but is instead “a nasty old brute”.
Among those expressing concern about the changes were Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson, the writers Philip Pullman and Salman Rushdie, and Tim Minchin, the comedian behind the Matilda musical. After the backlash, it was announced that a collection of Dahl’s books with unaltered text would also be published.
The Roald Dahl Story Company’s executive producer, Anna Schmitz, and its artistic director, Jenny Worton, said the new shows “demonstrate our ambitions in making new work”.
“With The Enormous Crocodile we wanted to make a show that speaks to four-year-olds, delights their older siblings and treats their parents to some brilliant music,” they said.
“The music is like Dahl’s stories in its capacity to capture audiences of all generations. It is at once dark, funny and compulsively moreish.
“We are passionately committed to reaching new audiences with our work and are delighted that the online storytelling production of The Magic Finger will ensure that young people from all backgrounds can enjoy a theatricalised reading of this story in their classroom for the first time.”
The Witches, which runs until January 2024, features three-time Olivier-nominated Katherine Kingsley and Bafta award-winner Daniel Rigby, who starred in the theatre production One Man, Two Guvnors.
The streaming giant Netflix also has productions of Dahl’s work in the pipeline, after a deal in 2021 when the company bought the rights to his entire catalogue of children’s books.
While Dahl has regularly featured among the UK’s favourite authors, his legacy has been under the spotlight in recent years. In 2020, his family apologised for the “lasting and understandable hurt caused by the author’s antisemitic statements”.
