The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe Festival Theatre Edinburgh 13th May 2025 Review
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is at the Festival Theatre Edinburgh this week (13 to 17 May) and from the moment that a lone pianist sits down at a piano (before the show actually begins), much of the atmosphere for this show is being put into place.
As the show proper begins, we are on a crowded train platform in WW2 as people rush about and four children prepare to become evacuees and board their train to a strange and new destination. A rousing rendition on piano and the cast of “We’ll Meet Again” firmly sets not only the time frame for this story but that message of hope that writer C S Lewis wove through this and his other Narnia books.
Bringing this story from the book to the stage must have been a difficult task for everyone involved, as not only are there so many different scenes, but also that element of pure fantasy somehow has to be recreated too. If you have the budget, this is where a film or television adaptation can let their imaginations run wild. A stage show, however, has a far more limited range of options at its disposal to do this, but the creative team behind this show have managed to bring something unique to the stage and this is obviously a very complex production that relies on a lot of things working at exactly the right moment. Even so, there was obviously some glitch this evening as the curtain came down unexpectedly for a small amount of time.
This show is a combination of live drama, live musicians, puppetry and at times good old tried and tested stage illusions. Creating a believable world for all of this to take place in is a combination of good costume and set design by Tom Paris and carefully used and often very effective atmospheric lighting design (Jack Knowles). The stage set and the lighting are also crucial to many of the on stage illusions. Sound design by Tom Marshall is also an important factor in this production.
Whilst it is always good (to me anyhow) to see live musicians performing on stage in a production like this, there is always that potential problem that, when used here as part of the cast, their primary abilities are musical and not dramatic. This by default leaves the non-musical dramatic cast to carry pretty much the whole performance weight of a show and here they all do that well. To be fair, there are also some nice character performances from the musicians.
So much of this show depends on the ability of the four “children” Edmund (Bunmi Osadolor), Lucy (Kudzai Mangombe), Peter (Jesse Dunbar) and Susan (Joanna Adaran) to not only make you believe that they are the age of the ones in the book, but also that they are a family and, for the most part, they all manage this with some interesting performances.
Many of the cast play multiple characters in this production, including Rhodri Watkins as amongst others the Professor and Father Christmas, and he has that light dramatic touch that both require here. As always though the villain of the show gets some of the best lines and Katy Stephens is obviously enjoying her role as the witch, with a nice portrayal of Mrs Macready from her too. Stantom Wright gets the opportunity here to be the impressive lion Aslan with some help from a large puppet Aslan too (Max Humphries puppetry designer and Toby Olie puppetry director).
Overall this is an impressive stage production which, with its many illusions and effects, was obviously holding the attention of the many children in the audience tonight, but I do wonder how much relevance the original books have to them today?
Review by Tom King © 2025
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com
As the show proper begins, we are on a crowded train platform in WW2 as people rush about and four children prepare to become evacuees and board their train to a strange and new destination. A rousing rendition on piano and the cast of “We’ll Meet Again” firmly sets not only the time frame for this story but that message of hope that writer C S Lewis wove through this and his other Narnia books.
Bringing this story from the book to the stage must have been a difficult task for everyone involved, as not only are there so many different scenes, but also that element of pure fantasy somehow has to be recreated too. If you have the budget, this is where a film or television adaptation can let their imaginations run wild. A stage show, however, has a far more limited range of options at its disposal to do this, but the creative team behind this show have managed to bring something unique to the stage and this is obviously a very complex production that relies on a lot of things working at exactly the right moment. Even so, there was obviously some glitch this evening as the curtain came down unexpectedly for a small amount of time.
This show is a combination of live drama, live musicians, puppetry and at times good old tried and tested stage illusions. Creating a believable world for all of this to take place in is a combination of good costume and set design by Tom Paris and carefully used and often very effective atmospheric lighting design (Jack Knowles). The stage set and the lighting are also crucial to many of the on stage illusions. Sound design by Tom Marshall is also an important factor in this production.
Whilst it is always good (to me anyhow) to see live musicians performing on stage in a production like this, there is always that potential problem that, when used here as part of the cast, their primary abilities are musical and not dramatic. This by default leaves the non-musical dramatic cast to carry pretty much the whole performance weight of a show and here they all do that well. To be fair, there are also some nice character performances from the musicians.
So much of this show depends on the ability of the four “children” Edmund (Bunmi Osadolor), Lucy (Kudzai Mangombe), Peter (Jesse Dunbar) and Susan (Joanna Adaran) to not only make you believe that they are the age of the ones in the book, but also that they are a family and, for the most part, they all manage this with some interesting performances.
Many of the cast play multiple characters in this production, including Rhodri Watkins as amongst others the Professor and Father Christmas, and he has that light dramatic touch that both require here. As always though the villain of the show gets some of the best lines and Katy Stephens is obviously enjoying her role as the witch, with a nice portrayal of Mrs Macready from her too. Stantom Wright gets the opportunity here to be the impressive lion Aslan with some help from a large puppet Aslan too (Max Humphries puppetry designer and Toby Olie puppetry director).
Overall this is an impressive stage production which, with its many illusions and effects, was obviously holding the attention of the many children in the audience tonight, but I do wonder how much relevance the original books have to them today?
Review by Tom King © 2025
www.artsreviewsedinburgh.com