The Witches review

Would you know a witch if you met one? She might be pushing the drinks trolley up the aisle when you fly off on holiday, stacking the shelves in the supermarket, or at your bedside in hospital; she might be that reassuring lollipop lady shepherding you across a busy road. “Not important, not commanding / just polite and undemanding,” simper a bevy of oh-so-innocuous women at the start of this new musical, a comedy-horror confection based on the 1983 children’s novel by Roald Dahl. But beware: nothing is quite what it appears in a story where the littlest mouse can be mighty and demonic power can burn in the breast beneath a cosy Boden cardi.

Adapted by playwright Lucy Kirkwood and directed by Lyndsey Turner, the show is a potent potion: treacly dark and lip-lickingly delicious, pleasingly subversive, giddying in its wit and invention – and, occasionally, just a little hard to swallow. Kirkwood cleverly reframes what’s been criticised as the book’s misogyny – the witches here are emphatically non-human, and disguise themselves as “ordinary” women simply because it’s a surefire way to ensure that they get ignored – and points up the sly commentary on class snobbery and ageism. Dave Malloy’s music is by turns bouncy and arrestingly jagged, his and Kirkwood’s lyrics are deft and quip-crammed, and Turner’s production is a shadow-stalked cackle-riot. It all comes close to rivalling that other Dahl-derived smash, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Matilda the Musical. While the first act flies, though, the narrative threads become snarled in the second; it would benefit from a sharp pair of scissors. Yet there’s so much else here that is nastily hilarious, heart-in-mouth thrilling or – with an impishness that sneaks up on you when you least expect it – piquantly moving that even when the brew is a little lumpy, you gratefully gulp it down.

Our diminutive hero is 10-year-old Luke (Bertie Caplan on press night), whose suburban life is unremarkable until his Mum and Dad are killed in a car crash. Handed over to impersonal state officialdom (“I do orphans,” declares his social worker with brutal briskness), he seeks the protection of his eccentric, cigar-smoking Norwegian grandmother (a delectably dry Sally Ann Triplett). Gran – who has a cheerful disdain for authority, and defiantly refuses to be patronised or pigeonholed as past it at 85 – is a secret witch-hunter, and she soon alerts Luke to the hidden peril all around: witches hate children, and their dastardly plan is to turn them all into mice that will be exterminated by their own unknowing parents and teachers, thus eradicating them from the world.

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