Wonderman

He might have seemed a man with his head in the clouds, but it’s more accurate to say that Roald Dahl fell from the sky. As an RAF pilot, running low on fuel, he forced his WW2 fighter plane into the ground. He was never the same again. The crash unleashed his creativity.

Daf James’ musical play twists Dahl’s short stories into his own life. Adam Redmore lies on a hospital bed in striped pyjamas, his head bandaged and bloody. As he drifts in and out of consciousness, unsure of who or where he is, delusions send him spinning into his stories.

Each is given real musical flavour by Lucy Rivers, and Dahl’s flights of fancy swish him from a bloody bet in Jamaica to a slaughterhouse in New York via the time-warped B&Bs of Brighton. They’re macabre tales these, of dead pigs and detached pinkies, and James implies a link between their horrors and post-traumatic stress disorder. None of us, he suggests, has complete control over our creative instincts.

But crediting a swirling subconscious ignores Dahl’s inventiveness, and the idea that the writer's dark fiction is entirely underpinned by his wartime experience is too neat by half, especially with PTSD painted in such broad brushtstrokes. A slight piece, it misses the opportunity to really explore the extraordinary fact of Dahl’s personality shift.

Still, Amy Leach’s cabaret-style staging taps into that strange Dahlian world with Hayley Grindle’s candyish costumes, and Gagglebabble’s cast relish each grotesque in turn.