The Witches at Curve, Leicester

reviewed for The Times, 4 January 2015

Image Credit: Catherine Ashmore

It’s one of Britain’s favourite children’s books, but when I get an invitation to an adaptation of The Witches my nose wrinkles. And not, like the Grand High Witch, because proximity to children makes this singleton think I’m sniffing dog droppings. Roald Dahl’s witches — balding, haggish and ineffectual — are the oldest of misogynist tropes, the caricature of the childless crone. Resolutely resistant to motherhood and to every traditional female destiny, they’re as repulsive to men as they’re feared by children.

So if you’re a childless, 29-year-old female critic, David Wood’s adaptation of The Witches will probably leave you feeling like a gloomy Christmas grinch. If you’re an eight-year-old child, however, I can’t imagine you will find a holiday show more compelling than Nikolai Foster’s bombastic, delightfully filthy creation. With magic tricks, wriggling mice in outlandish pants and a video close-up on nose-picking, the schoolchildren around me thought they were in heaven.

The cast are faultless: Sarah Ingram offers consummate villainy as the Grand High Witch, even though Dahl’s character seems to have prefigured the term “feminazi” (“Ze children of England vill be viped out,” declaims our Germanic spinster).

Mel Knott’s choreography fixes our attention exactly where the story needs it — Elexi Walker even gets a chance to hop about as an enchanted, and enchanting, frog. As the nameless Boy, Fox Jackson-Keen is particularly endearing when reminding our young audience that being small can be awfully exciting.

Yet there are still traces of Dahl’s distaste for the barren female. We get a whole song (Soup for the Single Lady!) about the unnaturalness of a middle-aged woman eating alone in a restaurant. Your gleeful children won’t mind in the slightest, but watching in private feminist horror I couldn’t help wishing that they would.