James and the Giant Peach - Greenwich Theatre and world tour
Preview by Lizzie Guilfoyle
ROALD Dahl’s classic James and the Giant Peach, adapted by David Wood, will tour the UK, Middle East and Asia this summer, opening at the Greenwich Theatre in London from April 14 to April 17, 2016.
The plot centers on an English orphan boy called James Henry Trotter who enters a gigantic, magical peach and has a wild, surreal cross-world adventure with seven magically-altered garden bugs he meets along the way.
In 1996, a British-American fantasy film was produced by Tim Burton and Denise Di Novi and directed by Henry Selick. Starring Paul Terry as James, the film is a combination of live action and stop-motion animation. Co-stars Joanna Lumley and Miriam Margolyes played James’s aunts in the live-action segments, and Simon Callow, Richard Dreyfuss, Susan Sarandon, Jane Leeves, and David Thewlis voiced his insect friends in the animation sequences.
The film’s composer, Randy Newman, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Music, Original Musical or Comedy Score. It won Best Animated Feature Film at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival.
David Wood began writing as a student at Oxford University in the sixties. He wrote his first play for children in 1967 and has since written over sixty more. They are performed all over the world and include The Gingerbread Man (nine London seasons), The Owl and the Pussycat Went to See (six London seasons, co-written with Sheila Ruskin), The Selfish Shelfish, The See Saw Tree, Save the Human (from the story he wrote with cartoonist Tony Husband), and The Plotters of Cabbage Patch Corner.
Wood’s stage adaptations of well-known books include Dick King-Smith’s Babe the Sheep Pig and Roald Dahl’s The BFG and The Witches. Both shows played long tours and two West End seasons. He also adapted and directed Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea in the West End.
James and the Giant Peach will be directed by Bronagh Lagan who, in 2011, directed and produced Henry VI Part I at the excavation site of The Rose Theatre Bankside. It was the first time a company had been allowed to perform on the actual ruins, the majority of which is submerged in water. The production was nominated by The Off West End Awards for Best Production and Best Director.
Her credits elsewhere include Girlfriends and Times Square Angel (Union Theatre), Rags – the musical (Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue), A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg (Greenwich Theatre), The Mistress Cycle (Landor Theatre) and Julius Caesar (The Scoop).
James and the Giant Peach will be designed by Kate Unwin, who has worked predominately in theatre. As well as the National Theatre, London’s West End, regional theatres all over the UK, she has designed many touring and outdoor productions.
James and the Giant Peach will be presented by Sell a Door Theatre Company, who have previously toured critically-acclaimed productions of Avenue Q, The History Boys, American Idiot and Seussical the Musical. David Hutchinson, Artistic Director of the company, said: “I am delighted to be back in the Greenwich Theatre, which is where we launched our production company back in 2007, and despite now being a multi-award-winning company, we always consider Greenwich as our home.”
The tour will also visit Abu Dhabi Theatre (April 23 – 24), Dubai Madinat (April 26 – 30), Bahrain Theatre (May 2 – 4), Doha Theatre (May 6 – 7), New Wolsey, Ipswich (May 17 – 21), Kings Theatre, Edinburgh (May 24 – 27) and Lyric Theatre, Hong Kong (June 3 – 5, 2016).