Theatre
The Witches
Dundee Rep
Neil Cooper
Three stars
Young audiences beware. Choose carefully which brand of sticky confectionery you stuff your faces with during the interval of Dundee Rep's festive production of Roald Dahl's supernatural classic, as adapted here by Dahl specialist David Wood. If you scoff down the wrong kind, you might just return having been transformed into a mouse. This is exactly what happens to the Boy narrator of the story and his greedy friend Bruno when they accidentally gatecrash an international witches conference in Bournemouth's swanky Hotel Magnificent.
Such notions of subjugation and social control over the young have already been cranked up at the witches conference itself. While the Tory-blue twin-sets stay on, attendees toss aside all vestiges of humanity that their wigs and gloves provide. This adds to the grotesquerie as Emily Winter's Grand High Witch holds the floor like some crazed tin-pot dictator waging war on imaginary enemies.
Using a mix of mouse puppets and human-size rodents scampering among giant-size hotel kitchen detritus, Jemima Levick's production starts off quietly, as Matthew Forbes' Boy unravels his story on Jean Chan's platformed set. With a ton of exposition to get through, things only really start to get spooky when the Boy is almost tempted down, Eden-like, from his Norwegian tree-house by a serpent-wielding witch.
With Jo Freer lending comic support as the Grand High Witch's hapless sidekick Beatrice, the show's strongest scene comes when the Boy, in collusion with Bruno and his Granny, conspire to give the witches an overdue taste of their own bitter medicine. As they twitch and shudder their way into oblivion, an entire chorus line of evil is given its just desserts.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here