Catherine Love on a beautiful but flawed stage adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle.
The magical world of Howl and his travelling abode is perhaps best known in animated form thanks to the acclaimed Japanese film adaptation of Dianna Wynne Jones’ novel. As it is now adapted for the stage in the Southwark Playhouse’s Vault space, animation is key to Davy and Kristin McGuire’s visually vivid reimagining of this tale.
The broad sweep of Jones’ novel has been compressed into a swift seventy minutes, largely through the aid of some typically twinkling narration from Stephen Fry and the stunningly innovative design that the McGuires first pioneered with The Icebook. Crafted as a giant pop-up book, the backdrop of the set is a white screen that is dominated by a cut-out castle and becomes the canvas for a series of strikingly beautiful animated projections.
These breathtaking moving images take us from young protagonist Sophie’s hat shop to the snow-topped mountains where she finds herself in Howl’s castle after being transformed into an old woman by the evil Witch of the Waste (Kristin McGuire). Conceited wizard Howl, played with charisma and comic flair by Daniel Ings, is on the run from this very witch, a nightmarishly vengeful ex-girlfriend.
Complemented by Fyfe Dangerfield’s haunting score, the stripped-down plot walks us through Sophie’s transformation of the castle and its master and the climactic confrontation with the witch – a breakneck story that occasionally skims over details. It soon becomes clear that Sophie, played by a suitably wide-eyed Susan Sheridan, is no ordinary girl.
As gorgeous as their lovingly crafted animations may be, Davy and Kristin McGuire have indulged the sweepingly cinematic at the expense of the theatrical. The result is a muddled production that is stranded somewhere in the no man’s land between play and film. Stranded too are the actors, who look oddly out of place as they perform in the sparsely populated dead space between screen and audience.
Taking a cue from the animated backdrop, the performances themselves verge on the cartoonish. The McGuires have opted for a stylised fairytale aesthetic that spills from design to direction but feels strained when taken off the screen. Although Ings brings sparkle to the role of Howl, this character is sometimes too big for the production, while Kristin McGuire’s Witch of the Waste is pure Disney villainess, a characterisation that is correspondingly two-dimensional when transplanted to the stage.
In a production that reaches for narrative magic, the creative team have neglected one of the most intrinsically magical elements at their fingertips: the Vault itself. This evocatively gothic space nestled under the arches of London Bridge station oozes magic from every inch of its exposed brickwork, but this has been replaced by the sterile animated walls of a castle that, although undeniably beautiful, never feels quite as enchanted as its surroundings.
In the process of aiming for cinematic scope in telling its story, this production’s main flaw is its neglect of the simple yet effective storytelling tools that theatre has at its disposal. Almost worth seeing for the dazzling visuals alone, there are undoubtedly the makings here of something truly spectacular. But ultimately, for all its beauty, Howl’s Moving Castle fails to take flight. 
Howl's Moving Castle runs at Southwark Playhouse until 7th January 2012.
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