If you hear elephants trumpeting and tigers growling on the wrong side of Regent’s Park from the zoo, it’s not because the animals have escaped: the Open Air theatre is giving the professional premiere to Samuel Adamson’s stage version of Michael Morpurgo’s story about a girl, Lilly, (a boy in the original book and at some performances here) who escapes the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami with the help of a friendly elephant, Oona. The protective Oona carries Lilly into the Indonesian rainforest where they make friends with the orangutans and encounter poachers working for a murderous baddie who is destroying the forest for profit.
First produced by the excellent Chichester Festival Youth theatre, this out-does both War Horse and The Lion King in the puppetry stakes. It’s Finn Caldwell and Toby Olié’s lifesize animals who are the real draw in a piece that lacks a convincing emotional underpinning (Lilly’s loss of both parents seem to pass almost unnoticed) and is way too earnest in the delivery of its conservation message. But it’s a brilliant spectacle.
There are cute baby orangutans, a stealthy crocodile, giant butterflies and, of course, Oona herself who requires a cast of four to manipulate her. It’s lovely stuff. A large young people’s ensemble play the devastating great wave with aplomb, and there’s an engaging central performance from Ava Potter as Lilly, a girl who turns personal disaster into animal magic.
- At Regent’s Park Open Air theatre until 12 June. Box office: 0844-826 4242.
