The Wolves in the Walls - Press Reviews

Here's a real cracker of a family show, and one that is likely to delight parents even as it deliciously scares their offspring. It's full of ingenious theatrical magic, sudden shocks, great jokes and highly hummable songs, with a faintly trippy atmosphere that will particularly appeal to retired hippies. The Wolves in the Walls is a co-production between the infant National Theatre of Scotland, whose first stage show this is (the company began operations with a series of site-specific pieces) and Improbable, those imaginative pioneers of theatre without frontiers. It's in the same tradition as Shockheaded Peter, though not quite as terrifying as that nightmarish parade of gory deaths, and is recommended to anyone over seven who's not easily scared. The Wolves in the Walls began life as an outstanding graphic novel by Neil Gaiman, with witty, disconcerting illustrations by Dave McKean. Directors Vicky Featherstone and Julian Crouch (the latter is also responsible for the splendid not-quite-real designs) remain admirably faithful to the original. The action is set in a detached house that at first glance couldn't be more ordinary, the home of Dad, a tuba player, Mum, who makes loads of jam, our heroine Lucy and her brother who is addicted to computer games. Everyone is so busy with their particular obsessions that Lucy seems unhappily neglected - even when she leaps into her father's lap, he keeps playing the tuba - and we wonder if the wolves might just be the product of an over-active imagination and a bid for attention. But there are strange crackling, crunching noises coming from the walls, and though the rest of the family pooh-poohs Lucy's fears, one night all hell breaks loose, as the wolves take over the house and the family has to seek refuge in the garden. The wolves themselves have been brilliantly designed by Crouch, horrible matted, mangy things with huge mouths with sharp teeth and horrid dangly limbs. They are puppets but you can't always tell where the puppet ends and the operator begins. Yet, though everyone says "it's all over if the wolves come out of the walls'', they aren't quite as ferocious as they seem, turning out to be naughty rather than downright nasty, though they make a terrific mess of the house as they play video games, take the microwave for a walk on a lead and learn the art of scratch DJ-ing. But then the family turns the tables, taking up residence in the walls themselves before a climactic battle-royal at the end, deliriously choreographed by Featherstone in a manner reminiscent of a great, silent film comedy. There are some terrific songs and incidental music by Nick Powell, ranging from folksy stuff for Mum (Cora Bissett), classical motifs for Dad (the actor Iain Johnstone appears to be playing a euphonium rather than a tuba, but he plays it pretty well), and a hilarious air-guitar rock sequence for the brother (Ryan Fletcher). As Lucy, Frances Thorburn gives a lovely performance of solemn concern and resourceful pluck - she actually returns to the wolf-infested house to rescue her toy pig - capturing all the anxiety and loneliness that can blight childhood. And in the final moments she springs a delightful surprise that it would be an absolute sin to reveal. Great stuff.

Lucy's house looks like an ordinary house. But Lucy knows that there is something different and strange about it: a feeling that anything could happen. Her busy jam-making mum, tuba-playing dad and big brother are dismissive of her fears, but Lucy is certain there are wolves living in the walls. And the wolves are about to come out. And as everyone knows, when the wolves come out of the wall, it's all over. Based on Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's cult picture book, this co-production between the National Theatre of Scotland and Improbable Theatre takes the form of a family opera that is acutely alert to the psychology of the child's mind. This is no Shockheaded Peter: it is intended for children, but it transports the adult back into the world of childhood, a world full of uncertainty, nameless fears and mystery, a place where bogeymen and monsters lurk under your bed and in your head. Like the book, the show is very scary and very safe at the same time, and it completely understands the child's fierce attachment to her home and the intense loneliness of modern family life where families live together and yet are apart doing their own thing. It could do with racking up the tension at the beginning, however. And, melodic though Nick Powell's score is, it is rather too well-behaved for this pandemonium, with its wonderful raggedy wolves - all long limbs, jaws and twisted smiles, so that they look endearingly terrifying, like Bambi with fangs. Quintessentially of the book, and yet also much more, this is a delightful, anarchically inventive exploration of the peculiar pleasures of fear, and it both conjures monsters and defeats them. Wolves and humans do a terrific job. I made sure to check under my bed before I turned the light out.

'If the wolves come out of the walls, it's all over.' Not in Glasgow. When the wolves hit the stage at the Tramway, a good show becomes its glorious best. The National Theatre of Scotland and Improbable have collaborated in this adaptation of the scary children's book by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. The Wolves in the Walls is ingeniously billed as 'a musical pandemonium' - a description that carefully avoids the cultural weight of 'opera' and takes the mumsy merriment out of 'musical' - suitable for all those 'over seven who aren't easily scared'. It's the first time Gaiman's work has been seen in the theatre, though he's written screenplays (Beowulf is being filmed by Robert Zemeckis, Mirrormask was directed by McKean) as well as adult fantasy novels and the Sandman comic-book series. It's unlikely to be the last: this mixture of the unsettling and the shrewd makes CS Lewis look like Davina McCall: it can only be months before someone stages the amazing Coraline, in which a little girl (most of Gaiman's heroes are heroines - yeah!) discovers an alternative life in which she has an 'other mother', with buttons for eyes, and a house that becomes a photograph of itself. It's a brilliant nightmare, because so much of it is nearly normal. The Wolves in the Walls - simply written and thoroughly creepy - is fired by Gaiman's obsession with parents who get sealed off from their children, and his fascination with secret lives. A small girl hears gnawings inside her house, and knows that wolves are in the walls. Her family don't believe her, until the lupine invaders take over: the humans scarper, but our heroine ingeniously suggests that they could live in the interstices of their own home - until they, too, are ready to come out of the walls. You could find here a story about the free-wheeling life of the unconscious, parental obtuseness, child bravery, panic about immigration. The only certain thing is that the story is always shifting: there's no dead space; those walls are heaving. Julian Crouch, one of the designer-directors of Improbable, is the man to animate those shifts. He's had a hand in the most imaginative theatre of the last decade: the grisly, gaudy toy-theatre of Shockheaded Peter and Sticky's 100-foot-high sellotape monster; he raised hell when he designed Jerry Springer - the Opera. He can tweak a creature from a crumpled newspaper and turn a jumble of tape into a giant spider. He doesn't make settings for dramas: his shape-changing designs are part of the action. For The Wolves in the Walls, Crouch echoes McKean's disturbing tangle of line-drawings, sculptural paintings and photographs but also makes something entirely his own. The wolves appear first as scratchy drawings on the curtain, then torch-light eyes glow like port-holes through the fabric. You glimpse them as spiky shadow puppets, and in full-blown burlap glory as enormous, part-human, part-puppet creatures. Sometimes an actor wears a sacking beast draped like a stole: its ping-pong-ball eyes glare above swivelling jaws, while long limbs dangle to the ground like strings of sausages. Sometimes a wolf-head perches on a fully human body: one wolf-dude saunters around in jeans, hand on hip as he hoovers to the sound of jazz. A wolf-fest rampage - one on a scooter dressed as Little Red Riding Hood, another savaging a standard lamp, a third swallowed up by a tuba - and one tugging a fluffy pet on wheels, which gets mangled and spat out by the fangs of his mates - is alone worth the price of a ticket. There are plenty of other visual treats: a house is scribbled on the curtain with a beam of light; a father's dream of tuba-playing glory is greeted by ghostly clapping hands; a boy's video game floods the stage with castles and crags. And an extraordinarily beguiling pig puppet floats like a podgy pink cherub above the wolves' snapping jaws. Crouch's co-director is Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland, who has pinpoint precision and an unusual panoramic focus. That shows, though some of the considerable talents she's brought in aren't yet at full strength. Steve Hoggett provides choreography that makes the action dance - everyone leaps, glides, sashays or elevates - but it sometimes looks too energetically arty. Nick Powell's songs - for which Gaiman has supplied some new words - are too bland: where's the really frightening number? The opening scenes of the show are goody-goody: mum dances around while making jam (waving spoons and beaming) as if in a Fifties' children's telly show. But it will grow. Powell's composition is not just songs: it's a soundscape - with lusty riffs for Iain Johnstone's impressive tuba-playing father and a compelling steely guitar tune for the computer-game-playing son (Ryan Fletcher gives an electric performance as he skids around the stage propelled by the stuff coming out of his earphones) - of bleeps and pings and electronic buzzings. He's composed a silvery sequence for the preserve-making mother which she tinkles out on the jars she is filling: jamelan. The show now goes on tour, to London and through Scotland. It will end up at the Ayr Gaiety, the theatre Crouch says inspired him as a young boy. Let's hope some young Crouches are in the audience: they could be carving out the theatre of the next 20 years.

Of all the shows that might set off to London and across the Atlantic as the calling card for the National Theatre of Scotland, no-one could have predicted this one – and that is far from being the only fantastic thing about it. Scottish enough (if you really care about such things) in its cast and its accent, Vicky Featherstone, Julian Crouch and Nick Powell have made a truly accessible piece of contemporary theatre that speaks of an outward-looking company (and nation) and will have appeal to the widest age range. The team effort that is evident on stage (choreographer Steven Hoggett, lighting designer Natasha Chivers and musical director Martin Lowe are absolutely crucial) also speaks volumes about the new organisation. Nonetheless, it is the hand of Crouch that is most immediately obvious. The vision behind Shockheaded Peter is expanded here in the most eye-teasing mix of slick technology and the endearingly hand-knitted. There are moments of real stage magic but also sequences of old-fashioned vaudeville. Above all this is a show about the joy of live performance, even as it embraces what is now possible. If sometimes it does seem as if the actors are playing second fiddle to the set, when they have the stage Frances Thorburn (as our young heroine Lucy), Cora Bissett (her mum), Iain Johnstone (dad) and especially Ryan Fletcher (geeky brother) don't waste the limelight. Powell's score gives Fletcher a showstopping heavy metal routine, but Bissett's Kate Bush pastiche was even funnier in my book. Most impressively, the score is both complex in itself and integral to the drama. After the wolves (Cait Davis, Ewan Hunter, Jessica Tomchack and Jason Webb) come out of the walls, the narrative flags a little and the sequence of set pieces seems a bit laboured, but that did not appear to bother the younger members of the audience. If a little editing might not go amiss, this is still a treat we should be proud to share.