Mr and Mrs Twit make a terrible twosome: he has old foodstuffs lodged in his beard, she wields her flatulence as a weapon against him. This production of The Twits at the Civic Theatre Tallaght, directed by Veronica Coburn of Barrabas, certainly embraces the more colourful traits of Roald Dahl's infamous pair, played by Alan King and Maria Hingerty. Dahl's story, here adapted by David Wood, centres on Mr and Mrs Twit, their mutual loathing and their efforts to snare the main ingredients of Hot Bird Pie.
The youngest members of the audience undoubtedly enjoyed their afternoon in the theatre. For my nine-year-old companions however, already familiar with the toe-curling antics of the original story, this adaptation proved a pale imitation. Dahl's original ends with a pile of clothes, while Coburn's production gives us five minutes of anti-climactic Jamaican lilting as a pacifier for very young children. Older children will miss the book's wicked-witch-of-the-west demise of the Twits when they shrink to nothing.
As energetic narrator and Roly Poly Bird, Damien Devaney is well able for small wise-crackers in the audience, and the actors generally do their best with a lacklustre stage play. For a production wanting to involve the "behind you" brigade, its panto accents of good and evil are not sufficiently clear. Mr Twit, for instance, conveyed no menace until the end.
Dahl's stories are so inventive that they can be difficult to translate to a stage production. The pivotal scene in which the monkeys turn the Twits' room upside-down should involve more than an inverted lampshade. Wood has adapted several of Dahl's works for performance by school groups, and has consequently adapted The Twits with suitable minimalism. To bring Dahl's zany world to life away from the classroom requires an injection of imaginative staging to do justice to his sense of mischief.
Mention of an extravaganza in the first five minutes of any production - however ironically intended - can pitch audience expectations too high. The Twits promises a holiday firework but generates few sparks in the end.
Runs until January 20th; tel: 01-4627477
