Yahoo Lifestyle Breaking Baz: Roald Dahl’s ‘The BFG’ To Become A Spectacular Stage Show With Flying Giants By Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company
EXCLUSIVE: Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s book The BFG, which Steven Spielberg turned into a 2016 movie starring Mark Rylance, now is being adapted into a stage spectacular by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The show’s such a mammoth undertaking, as you would expect about a show featuring 10 Goliaths stomping and flying around the stage, that three arts organizations — the RSC, the Chichester Festival Theatre and the Roald Dahl Story Company — have joined forces to bring the tall tale to life.
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It follows the recent success of versions of Dahl’s The Witches at the National Theatre and The Enormous Crocodile, which played at the Leeds Playhouse and the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre.
The BFG is being adapted from Dahl’s 1982 book by playwright Tom Wells (Jumping for Goalposts, The Kitchen Sink), a recipient of the prestigious Simon Gray Award, named after the dramatist whose plays include Butley, Otherwise Engaged and Quartermaine’s Terms, most of which were directed by Harold Pinter.
Daniel Evans, an award-winning actor who now is co-artistic director of the RSC with Tamara Harvey, will direct the production, which begins performances at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon from November 25-January 31, 2026.
It then will transfer to Chichester Festival Theatre — where Evans had been artistic director until he joined the RSC — from March 16 for a limited season.
Evans began developing The BFG while at Chichester.
He and Jenny Worton, artistic director of the Roald Dahl Story Company, now owned by Netflix, picked Oleta Haffner to compose music for the giants to pound their feet to, though it is not a musical.
Evans says he and Worton both cried “she’s the one!” after listening to her compositions. They also were impressed that she spoke of famed movie composer John Williams being one of her influences, “which is right what we needed,” Evans adds.
Evans and Worton, during an exclusive interview ahead of today’s official announcement, both stressed that the giants of the piece will not be singing and tap-dancing, but they will be flying.
The gargantuan story’s about “this very unlikely alliance between Sophie — an orphan girl — a giant and a queen. And they come together in order to beat the bullies, basically the bad giants who are eating children,” says Evans.
The kindhearted title character BFG stands well apart from the nine nasty carnivores who reside in parched Giant Country.
“First of all,” Evans explains, ”the BFG is a mixologist of dreams. So he collects dreams and he mixes them and blows good dreams, productive dreams, into the ears of children while they’re sleeping. And he keeps what he calls the troggle humps, the nasty dreams, back. And when Sophie realizes this, she has these amazing ideas — that you could give a nightmare to a very powerful person and that could maybe make them see the awful things that are going on in the world.“
Evans intoned, as if reciting a Shakespearean verse: “If you have courage, you can use your dreams to bring about good in the world, good for you and good for other people.”
Fundamentally, Worton notes, “the story is about the power of the child. And she’s not an extraordinary child, she doesn’t have special powers. She’s just got determination, imagination — and heart. And she comes up with this brilliant, imaginative plan to make change in the world.”
The show, Worton adds ”speaks to the childishness in us all.”
Evans sighs, then chuckles. “My God, it’s a real challenge to theatricalize it,” he says as he paints a picture of how “you’ve got to have dreams that can float through the air, change shape, change color, go into jars, come from jars into trumpets and are blown into people’s ears.”
He has assembled a cracking creative team to realize these fantastical “dreams”.
They include puppetry designer and director Toby Olié; set designer Vicki Mortimer; costume designer Kinnetia Isidore; lighting designer Zoe Spurr; video designer Akhila Krishnan; illusions by the wizard, Chris Fisher; composer and sound designer Carolyn Downing; choreographer and movement director Ira Mandela Siobhan; puppetry co-designer Daisy Beattie; and senior set design associate, Matt Hellyer.
The casting director is Christopher Worrall, and the children’s casting director is Verity Naughton.
I ask how they will “cast” the BFG — will he be played by an actor or a colossal puppet?
Evans grins in response. ”I can’t possibly give that away, but what I will say is that there’s going to be elements of surprise that will keep audiences on their toes throughout because there’s a big theme in the play, which is about power. And just because you are big, it doesn’t mean that you feel powerful or indeed have power. And the BFG, initially to little Sophie, seems like he’s very, very powerful and scary. But then when she meets the Bloodbottler giant , not only does BFG shrink in size, but she realizes that he’s also being bullied. So power is not always a corollary with size. You can be very small and be very powerful.”
Tell Donald Trump that, I say.
Sophie will be played by a human child, in the book she’s age 8. Evans and Worton say they will need three children to take turns performing the role, as was the case in the RSC’s Olivier- and Tony Award-winning musical version of Dahl’s Matilda, which is still running in London’s West End.
Evans has a “big idea” for who will play the queen, but he’s not giving her name away just yet.
It won’t be just any old queen. “It’s hard to get away from the fact,” says Evans, “that the depiction of the queen feels very, very leaning into Queen Elizabeth II. It never names her, but it feels like her as the kind of maternal figure of the nation.”
The story, it seems to me, lends itself more to the stage than it does the screen, and I’m referring to Spielberg’s film adaptation, which lacked spark.
Evans, nodding his head, says: “I think that’s partly because the story is so challenging to do. See, you have to think outside the box. Film demands a kind of reality, even if it’s live-action. In a film nowadays, of course, you have to lean into CGI. You can’t do that in the theater. You have to find different ways to tell the story. And I think sometimes you could say it’s a kind of limitation in a theater, in one sense, because you don’t have all the computer wizardry to turn things inside out. However, on the other hand, that limitation then becomes limitless because you use the audience’s imagination.“
And the creative team, says Evans, will use its imagination to go, ‘Actually, we could do anything.’”
Evans smiles and adds that this notion of dreams and imagination is also very Shakespearian.
“Think of the prologue in Henry V, when Chorus says, ‘Imagine that you see the fields of France.’ And he literally directly asks the audience: ‘On your imaginary forces, let us work.’ Puck, at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, utters, ‘If you slumbered here, imagine that we were just a dream.’
“So there is something about theater that is also dreamlike because it’s with you and then it goes,” he adds. “Shakespeare’s been with me quite a bit actually, thinking about how he viewed the imagination and linked it to theater.”
Evans is describing the show as contemporary “but without mobile phones.”
In April, Evans will gather his collaborators and creative team to run a final workshop to examine every element of the production. Then final casting, followed by rehearsals after the summer.
The RSC enjoyed success with the marvelous adaptation of Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbour Totoro, which played to packed houses for two seasons at the Barbican Theatre in London. It transfers into the Gillian Lynne Theatre in the West End on March 8. And there’s a lot of chatter about My Neighbour Totoro crossing to New York within the next couple of years.
The unspoken hope is that The BFG will follow a similar trajectory following its initial seasons at Stratford-upon-Avon and Chichester.
For now, however, Evans and Worton are purely concerned with getting the giants on their feet at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.
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