The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

There’s no point asking Jude how to take a children’s classic story and make it better when Michael Fentiman is obviously a bit of an expert in the matter. His touring production returns to London, this time with a new White Witch but the same bag of tricks that has turned this production into a modern masterpiece.

In this visual thunderbolt of a production, Fentiman trades overt dramatisation for poetic theatre—where puppets, light, and motion become the lexicon of magic. The script recedes; we are not in Narnia to follow words but to be drenched by worlds. The characters we have known from the many, many adaptations are all present and correct and rendered with a magnetic quality.

Aslan’s entrance is not narrative, but spiritual. Max Humphries’s puppet design—a near-full-body, three-person creation—is sculptural, breathing in terra-cotta tones. The lion puppet and Stanton Wright’s human embodiment perform a duet of flesh and myth, a performance that trembles between reverence and uncanny life. At the other end of the scale, Schrödinger the small family cat, is elevated to enigmatic portent, prowls like a silent oracle, poignantly mewing when not pointing Lucy toward the wardrobe portal. Other creatures emerge through gesture and suggestion, their presence conjured by human bodies, masks, and movement rather than literal representation.

Tom Paris’s design is a choreography in concentric geometry—a clock-face, moon phases, circular portals that blend home and elsewhere in a single frame. The suitcases that light up as train windows, the glowing cubes of Turkish delight which are made to disappear from plain view, the swirling bed-sheet transformations—all transform mundane objects into metaphysical thresholds. We are pulled into this world whether we like it or not, in much the same way the Pevensies are attracted to Narnia. The ensemble doubles as musicians, set-shifters, and narrative chorus, collapsing the theatrical hierarchy into a living scenario. Everything we see has multiple meanings and purposes, the mark of a mature and memorable production.

Jack Knowles’s lighting (and in some venue incarnations, shadowy crescendos) bathes the stage in gradients of dusk and dawn. Scenes shift not by scene changes but by breathing shifts of tone. Half-lit silhouettes, moonlit glows, lantern shadows flutter and fly, rarely settling but never distracting away from the central drama. Illusions by Chris Fisher and aerial flourishes by Gwen Hales embed magic in the ether—Jadis levitates, draped in white fabric halos and even Turkish delight morphs into a glowing figure.

Fentiman seems to treat dialogue as dust motes in a shaft of light: present, but not essential. The script is, amid this multi-layered show, a little too on the nose.The underwritten characters are rarely anchors of theatrical gravity; they are here not to explore philosophical or theological points as Lewis intended but just one more aspect to this rich tapestry.

What remains—as with any great theatre—is not what was said, but what was felt. This Lion, Witch & Wardrobe is not a tale told but an incantation cast. The script recedes into the wings; the actors dissolve into tableaus of light, wire, fabric, and shadow. And in that dissolution, Narnia blooms.