Stig of the Dump at the Arts Theatre, WC2

reviewed for The Times, 28 July 2016

It’s the summer holidays, and the season of vamped-up childcare masquerading as children’s theatre. Yet if you were hoping to sit your kids passively in front of something quiet for an hour, you might want to give Stig of the Dump a miss. Tom Attwood’s music has them twisting in the aisles, learning a dance routine every ten minutes. The CBeebies star Katy Ashworth makes for a very energetic Grandma; real-life grannies will find it harder to keep up.

Instead of party dances, Clive King’s original book kept children gripped with its haunting sense of ancient memory. Eight-year-old Barney finds a neolithic caveman living in a chalk pit, but this all-too-modern dump was once a sacred site and still has powers to transport boys between epochs.

Eventually our young hero gets a time-shifting glimpse of a landscape past. That’s largely lost in Mike Kenney’s adaptation, the climax truncated and weakened. Instead we get beautiful puppetry, bombastic performances and a jolly good time. It’s fun, but hardly enlightening.

As Barney, William Pennington is endearing and energetic, well supported by an enthusiastic Chandni Mistry as his sister, Lou. The politics are firmly middle-class. Hunting, a central theme in the 1963 book, is protested as a cruel sport played by snobs; the antagonists, on the other hand, are the decidedly chavish Snarget gang, who look as if they’re hanging out at a skate park circa 1996.

The director, Luke Sheppard, is a young star to watch: his Casa Valentina was the best thing at the Southwark Playhouse last year. Yet this isn’t his best material: storytelling moments are lost in the babble of narrators.

Gabriella Slade’s set is impressively detailed given that it’s camping on the set of the Arts Theatre’s permanent resident, American Idiot, but adds to the crowding on stage. My six-year-old critic loved the dancing; his older sister wondered what the story was.