Lauren Romano doesn't quite get that glint of gruesomeness we've come to expect from Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales.
"Naughty little boys are likely to get punished nowadays, you ought to know that" so a prefect tormentor informs his whimpering fag, as Jeremy Dyson’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Twisted Tales draws to its dark denouement. This, the first stage production of Dahl’s adult fiction, directed by Polly Findlay and brought to life by the artfully ingenious stage design of Naomi Wilkinson, darts between black comedy and despair as its creeps its way through five menacingly macabre tales, dripping with human cruelty.
At a foggy 1950s train station, a smooth talking stranger interrupts the uneventful journeys of three commuters and taps into their deeply buried pasts with terrible consequences. Things get off to a shaky start. The unfortunate case of Billy Weaver who ends up in the home of a landlady with a penchant for taxidermy and lacing her guest’s tea with poison, is farcical rather than frightening. Then there’s the adulterous dentist’s wife, Mrs Bixby. After her lover gives her a mink coat as a departing gift, she embroils herself in an infuriatingly silly plot to conceal it from her husband. Disappointingly, it doesn't have that glint of gruesomeness I had geared myself up for.
No, things don’t really get going until tale number three when a decidedly darker tone is set as a cocky American engages in a bet with a sadistic Spaniard. If the American manages to light his lighter ten times in a row he wins a Cadillac. If he slips up, the little finger on his left hand gets lopped off by the cleaver wielding tormentor, who takes great delight in dragging his blade repeatedly across the table: The suspense is palpable. Torment and revenge seeps with relish into the tale of William and Mary, when an oppressive husband on the verge of death from pancreatic cancer, decides to have his brain preserved in a tank of fluid along with one sole eye. Dr Landy assures him he will have the detachment and serenity befitting the life of a philosopher; until that is, his smothered wife, Mrs Pearl returns and revels in tormenting him.
The final tale transports the audience from the gruesomely outlandish to the very real cruelty of the public school system Dahl himself experienced. “You, you snivelling thing, are a punishable offence” a dictatorial Foxley concedes as he mercilessly beats the young Perkins and the drama comes crashing back, with a sharp jolt of horror to the train station platform. “The imagination is a ferocious beast, it needs regular exercise” we are told in the closing lines and here, in the fateful ending we have proof of the power of stories to incite and suppress our most painful memories and darkest desires. While the tales do begin to probe these dark facets the result is a bit hotchpotch and the jumbled yarns, though delivering some moments of superb acting from the likes of Selina Griffiths and George Rainsford, don’t delve nearly deep enough.
"Expect the unexpected" the show promises and while I'm envisaging being cast into a tizzy of spine tingling terror, this never materialises. For 80 minutes of oddly engaging, macabre meanders this is a spot on piece of theatre, just don't expect to be clinging to the edge of your seat.
Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales runs at Lyric Hammersmith until 26th February
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