James and the Giant Peach
James and the Giant Peach
Dundee Rep
Neil Cooper
"GIVE them a peachy juice burst", the legend declaims from a speech bubble attached to the face of a fresh-faced infant on the giant billboard that acts as a stage curtain for the interval of Jemima Levick's festive production of Roald Dahl's five a day-based classic.
David Wood frames his stage version around the sort of New York walking tour normally the preserve of A-list movie stars. Here, we find young James Henry Trotter exercising his possibly lysergically influenced gardening skills from the inside of a beat-up caravan on a slice of Central Park that resembles a revolving traffic island.
Accompanied by a posse of human-sized insects, James embarks on a fantastic voyage that sees the unidentified fruity object that freed him from a pair of wicked aunties move across land, sea and air before coming home to roost in the big apple itself. With the ever expanding peach represented in Jean Chan's surrealist-influenced design work by a series of increasingly larger umbrellas, Levick's cast, led by Thomas Cotran as a wide-eyed James, should be relieved they landed atop the Empire State Building rather than in downtown Ferguson, where the local constabulary might have greeted them with something different to a ticker-tape parade.
Each of the insects is imbued with suitably larger than life characteristics, from Scott Gilmour's shoe-hoarding Centipede and David Delve's dour Earthworm to Keith Macpherson's fiddle playing grasshopper. All of the cast double up as assorted sea creatures in a magical underwater scene in a show where you'll really believe a peach can fly.
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