It’s early morning. A barber shop quartet of happy birds are greeting the dawn with a song. Suddenly a farmer appears, there is a blast from a shotgun and the four birds fall off their perch. It’s a murderously good beginning for Sam Holcroft’s reimagined stage version of the familiar Roald Dahl tale about the fox who outwits a trio of greedy farmers. It captures all the gruesomeness of Dahl’s original while also neatly making the point that Farmers Bean, Boggis and Bunce are at war not just with a thieving fox but with nature itself.
The show doesn’t quite maintain this level of wit and thoughtfulness. But there is always plenty to enjoy in two hours laced with jaunty songs by the multi-talented Arthur Darvill and a cast expanded from Dahl’s original story to include a ditzy rabbit, a badger with an obsessive eye for detail, a mole with a vast knowledge of rock formations and a mouse whose listening skills come in handy. In the end, it is not just the Robin Hood-influenced Mr Fox, stealing from the haves to feed the have-nots, who proves fantastic, but all the animals who help win the day. The moral is driven home, a little too forcefully, that every animal has a purpose and we are stronger together than alone.
Perhaps the show loses its nerve because earlier on it appears to be heading into rather more interesting territory. There’s a Thatcherite rodent who refuses to believe in society and puts self-interest before the interests of everyone else. His attitudes reflect the stance of the farmers who sing: “Your children may be starving but we don’t care.” However, the messages are sometimes confusing, with the farmers representing capitalism at its worst but also Little Englanders protecting their patch against incomers and those in need. Richard Atwill’s Farmer Bean becomes increasingly deranged as he leads the others towards disaster, suggesting that selfishness is a kind of madness.
Tom Scutt’s three-tiered design is undeniably useful, but lacks any sense of the natural world and is uncharacteristically ugly. Maria Aberg’s production is sometimes inventive (the red-eyed, sharp-toothed snarling dog is a real crowd-pleaser) and always good-natured but, like Holcroft’s script, slightly lacks a real sense of fun and any really good jokes.
Greg Barnett brings terrific energy to the full-of-himself Mr Fox, an egotist who still insists that only he can help the other animals out of their predicament, even when he has lost his tail and is half the fox he once was. In a nice touch, it is Mrs Fox who, recognising her husband suffers from an overload of testosterone, comes to the rescue in the nick of time.
The cast are brilliant at making every character distinctive, and the doubling works really well. It’s a benignly enjoyable evening, but one that, with greater bravery, might have been a whole lot foxier.
- At Nuffield theatre, Southampton, until 8 January. Box office: 023-8067 1771. Then touring.
