The stonking success of 2010’s Stratford festive offering Matilda the Musical has happily not proved intimidating for those supplying the shows to follow. Last year’s The Heart of Robin Hood saw a light-hearted, if scarcely Christmassy, take on the adventures of a popular hero and for 2012 the playwright Tamsin Oglesby has come up with a winning adaptation of Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child.

This being a popular novel for children, the work is an unfamiliar one to the present reviewer. An informative programme note quotes the opinion of the Daily Telegraph’s obituarist on Hoban that his 1967 offering was “the children’s novel that Samuel Beckett never wrote”. While this might not suggest fare entirely suitable for younger theatregoers, the beguiling weirdness it implies in fact turns out to be entirely up their street.

So, too, do the bizarre twists to the plot. While I sat wondering at times what on earth was going on in Paul Hunter’s production, with occasional consultation of the synopsis supplied, the youngsters all around me in the stalls were clearly having a whale of a time at the antics depicted. Iain Johnstone’s jazzy score, brilliantly delivered by a seven-strong band, was a prime source of delight.

Another was the show’s principal villain. In Michael Hodgson’s bowler-hatted dictator rodent Manny the rat is a real rotter. Patrolling the wide spaces of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre’s thrust stage, with his attendant henchman, Manny is there to thwart at every turn the engaging pair of heroes whose odyssey we follow.

The story is essentially one of a mission to return to home for a clockwork mouse (Daniel Ryan) and his child (Bettrys Jones). They are separated from their friends Elephant (Carla Mendonça) and Seal (Naomi Sheldon) when they are bought as Christmas presents for children and subsequently cast away.

In their perilous journey to return to their toyshop, they encounter a delightful range of oddball characters. These include — one of the Beckettian touches — an encounter with an experimental theatre group, the Caws of Art, composed of a pair of crows (Martin Hyder and Julia Innocenti) and a colourful parrot (Stephen Harper). There are further satirical touches in the presentation of a fortune-telling frog (David Charles) as a laid-back hippy spouting visionary nonsense in quintessentially sixties style.

That the actors all sport costumes that suggest rather than faithfully depict the animals they portray is another reason why the programme sometimes comes in very handy.

 

FOUR STARS

Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon. Till January 12. Box office 0844 800 1110