Stage fright

The smash hit Matilda, based on a Roald Dahl story, has spawned a copycat effort, The Twits. Charm, sweetness and mystery aren’t Dahl’s strong points. He specialises in suburban grotesques who commit infantile barbarities. But his prose is sensational. No ‘style’ at all, just the simplicity and clarity of a master copywriter. He’s as good as Orwell. Mr and Mrs Twit are a pair of malignant outcasts who enjoy tormenting innocents. They keep a family of monkeys in a cage and they glue birds to trees and shoot them. You can read the story in about 20 minutes. It probably took Dahl a bit longer than that to write. And Enda Walsh’s essay-crisis adaptation may have delayed him for a day or two. He supplements Dahl’s threadbare yarn with a tepid romance between a man and a monkey, and he adds a tussle for the ownership of a funfair, but this doesn’t fix the basic problem. The material doesn’t belong on stage. It lacks a central personality, a unifying mission and any sympathetic characters.

Chloe Lamford’s design is spectacularly grubby. Everything is as brown as the 1970s including Mr Twit’s mushroom-cloud beard, which moults bits of old food. The set is ingenious: a fat drum unfolds to reveal half a dozen concealed interiors. Nicely done but hardly worth the trip alone. Press night was an oddly cheerless affair. The progeny of the Critics’ Circle filled the pews. Much fidgeting, little guffawing. My son, aged 8, declared the show a triumph. But he kept up a barrage of comments and questions throughout, which suggests that his five-star verdict was a ploy to win him further outings.