Wolf Witch Giant Fairy, Royal Opera House review ★★★★★

Janet and Allan Ahlberg did it with Each Peach Pear Plum. Stephen Sondheim did it with Into The Woods. For the ultimate folk and fairy tale, mash the whole lot together.

Wolf Witch Giant Fairy in the Linbury Theatre at the Royal Opera House is a tartan plaid in song and movement, with strands woven from several children’s traditional stories. Among the characters, a big bad wolf, eyeing up tasty humans. And the sinister witch Baba Yaga from Slavic folklore. The fee-fi-fo giant at the top of Jack’s beanstalk. The earthbound spirit who, despite having lost magical attributes – here, a fairy’s wings – retains some otherworldly powers.

Meeting them all is Little Red (wearing her riding hood), who canters through her adventures in a wood by moonlight with the help of eight multi-talented actors and instrumentalists, and a narrator of Cat in the Hat cheeriness in the very entertaining form of Peter Brathwaite.

Peter Brathwaite is the narrator. Photo: Marc Brenner

In just over an hour, Little Red dodges the wolf, flees from the witch, sells a village’s sole cow for beans, sprouts them with her tears, scrambles up to defeat the giant in his lair, and resumes her woodland visit to grandmother, where the wolf is waiting in Grandmother’s clothes ….

With much ground to cover, the action moves at top speed, and is shot through with jokes for adults, often at the expense of theatrical conventions. ‘Play my song,’ snarls the Wolf, played with glam rock seductiveness by Edmund Danon, standing in for Tom Penn, who played percussion. ‘What’s that? Milk it with a song, you say?’ offers the witch’s familiar, Cat. The Golden Goose is similarly knowing: ‘I hope she’ll be all right. That’s a pretty ominous chord…’

The music that the characters treat with distain is, in reality, sung and played with verve and expertise as the cast hurtle from instrument to instrument. A rattling East European energy propels the score along, musical director Dominic Conway on stage with a series of stringed instruments, but it is unmemorable. On the way home, my companion, neighbour Jack, nearly eight, sang me We Three Kings of Orient Are. We wondered why that had stuck in his head instead of Wolf Witch's score, and decided it was because of the twin talismans of simplicity and repetition, which the show eschews.

Claire Wild as Baba Yaga. Photo: Marc Brenner

But Samuel Wyer’s set and costume designs are unconventional and witty, deploying, like any self-respecting family production at home, household objects. There are moments of magic, too. 'How did they do that?' marvelled Jack, when the beanstalk shot to the sky. And there are moments of wisdom. 'Your lack of kindness makes you weak,' says Little Red of shrieking Baba Yaga. Test this out on the politician of your choice.

Jack and I discussed the show, between carols, on the way home, pretty happy with our outing. 'The bad news is, it's over the top sometimes,' he declared. What about the star rating, out of five? 'Four. Four. Five,' said Jack, never one to do things by halves. And of course, he is right: Four stars for staging. Four stars for performance skills. And five stars for heart.

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Wolf Witch Giant Fairy is sung in English with English subtitles. It is a Royal Opera and Little Bulb production. Further performances are on 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 30, 31 Dec, and 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Jan. The performance on 20 December is audio described with Touch Tour. The performances on 21 Dec are interpreted into British Sign Language.