It feels awful to dump on Michael Fentiman’s staging of CS Lewis’s beloved Narnia fantasy, but it’s ponderously slow and woefully short on magic. Samantha Womack is an icy, one-note witch while the giant puppet of Aslan the lion comprises only a head, musclebound front legs, and a jinking tail. It looks like a roadrunner on ‘roids. The third-billed wardrobe, however, is solidly impressive.
This wintry story, with its unsubtle Christian subtext and a guest appearance by Santa Claus, feels wildly out of place in midsummer, a week after the UK almost caught fire. And the low-key charms of Fentiman’s production, with its folksy songs and winsome steampunk animals, evaporate in a 1,024-seat West End theatre.
