Lavish version of The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe will be “a rougher, more elemental telling of the story”
The show is being adapted and co-directed by the Olivier award-winning Rupert Goold, best known for his acclaimed productions of Macbeth , King Lear and Oliver! It is being produced by the same company that created a high-tech version of Peter Pan , which was also staged in a big-top tent in Kensington Gardens in 2009.
“ The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe left a huge impression on me as a child,” says Goold. “Its combination of fairytale strangeness and mythic spirituality seemed fundamentally English in sensibility, and returning to it now as an adapter and in reading all the stories to my children I also find it strangely Shakespearean too.”
He adds that he has modernised the characters. “What I hope to evoke is the power of faith and the danger of tyranny in a rougher, more elemental telling of the story… What I wanted to avoid, which has been the pitfall of other stagings, is four children who you can’t really differentiate between, who seem rather privileged and succeed through right of their blood line.”
