This is not so much a dog as a mongrel. Bits of Debbie Isitt's production, which cleverly splices film and live action, are terrific and bits don't work at all. The trouble is that the two often don't seem to fit together. It makes for a very strange, very uneven evening.
Isitt's attempt to rescue Dodie Smith's book from Disneyfication is to be applauded. But to suggest that this story about saving your skin can be seen as a metaphor for the Jews in Nazi Germany or the Kosovans is stretching it too far. The same can be said of the moment when one of the baddies pretends to pour petrol over a Dalmatian and looks around for a light. I have seldom sensed such audience distress .
Isitt suggests in the programme that much theatre for young people is patronising. That's true. But here we've gone in one leap from fluffy bunnies to Auschwitz. (Yes, there is a gassing scene.) The show is too dark for the suggested age range of five and over.
There is a world of difference between the unflinching cruelty of productions for children set in a fictionalised world, and this. Dalmatian puppies are portrayed by cute babies with blackened noses and later by small children, who are seen on film being abducted from a playground. One is a safe way of dramatising the harsh realities of the world; the other just asks for disturbed nights.
This production is wonderfully atmospheric in a creepy kind of way, and there are some great set pieces, including a whirling snowstorm that engulfs the whole of the stalls. But why is Carren Waterfield's hyperventilating Cruella De Vil played as a cross between Norma Desmond and Miss Havisham? By the end, like Cruella, I felt like howling.
Until May 6. Box office: 02476 553055.
