EXCLUSIVE: Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) has something astronomic to boast about – the first look image of The BFG, the colossal star of its stage spectacle adapted from Roald Dahl’s best-selling children’s book.
The BFG has its first preview performance tonight at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and Daniel Evans,the RSC’s co-artistic director with Tamara Harvey, and the show’s director, wants to show off the work created by puppet designer and puppetry director Toby Olié and his team.
The vast show has been adapted by Tom Wells with additional material by dramaturg Jenny Worton. It is one the RSC’s biggest productions since Les Misérables and Matilda.
Size is an intrinsic part of the show’s visual language. Puppets range from 16.4 foot behemoths to tiny 7.8 inch puppet versions of Sophie, the tale’s orphan heroine.
The cast of ‘The BFG’ rehearse with segments of a giant puppet. Image: Marc Brenner
One dark, silvery moonlit night, Sophie is snatched from her bed by the BFG. Luckily for her, the BFG doesn’t want her for breakfast because he prefers chomping snozzcumbers and guzzling green fizzy frobscottle to dining on children.
He, Sophie and the Queen form an alliance to vanquish the nine big fellas who reside in Giant Country – Fleshlumpeater, Manhugger, Bonecruncher, Childchewer, Meatdripper, Gizzardgulper, Maidmasher, Bloodbottler and the Butcherboy – before they gobble up the world’s kiddies.
For one of the show’s early workshops, Evans gathered circus performers to play the giants by having the acrobats stand on each other’s shoulders, but that balancing act meant that they just weren’t able to go very fast. “And there’s a sort of booby trap,” Evans suggests, because people think that giants move slowly. ”But in fact, BFG in the novel can really race over landscape. It can leap over a lake really fast.”
Around that time, Evans had a conversation with Olié, a renowned puppeteer whose creations have featured in the stage version of director John Caird and Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away, Rob Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s adaptation of Animal Farm and many others.
Olié first came to prominence when he helped, along with others, Handspring Puppet Company develop the thoroughbred, half draft that was to become the titular War Horse when the play originated at the National Theatre.
Elsie Laslett is held aloft during rehearsals for ‘The BFG’
Evans says that one crucial thing about The BFG story is that it’s “so much about keying into one’s power.”
Initially, Sophie thinks that the BFG kidnaps her because he’s big and powerful. But very quickly she finds out that he too is bullied because there’s another giant who’s bigger than him called the Bloodbottler. “So even big things can feel powerless,” Evans says.
“Queens can be powerless because the establishment runs them. And so when we keyed into that idea, it was then in our discussions about how we can change the audience’s perspectives,” Evans says.
Those power dynamics that Evans referenced means that the trio of giant, orphan and Queen really go through this story together, Olié explains.
What Evans, Olié and their collaborators further developed was a way to visually and physically show those power dynamics – a sort of sliding scale – that essentially puts the audience into each of those characters’ shoes whenever that character is played by an actor.
Helen Lymbery who plays The Queen during reheasals for ‘The BFG’ . Marc Brenner
So we start off with BFG as huge puppet when Sophie is kidnapped and she’s played by child actor. “And then so that he feels really imposing and the audience feels like we’re in her shoes,” Olié says.
The BFG stands at more than 16 foot and he’s operated by four people – someone on the head, someone on his body, and a person on each arm. But then when the bigger and more imposing giant knocks on the door, each of the key characters – Sophie, BFG and Queen go down a notch so that BFG becomes an actor, not a puppet. Sophie is represented by a sort of half life-sized puppet – she’s just over seven inches height.
And then, says Olié, the Bloodbottler is a much, much bigger puppet than the BFG, “so the audience then go, ‘Okay, now I’m in BFG shoes, now I’m feeling the fear’,” Olié says.
“Language of scale”
Essentially, every main character kind of exists in two or three measurements.
This “language of scale”, Olié observes, has been constantly evolving throughout the development period and there will be a stream of theatrical surprises – “if we do our job well, until the curtain call.”
The miniatures of Sophie have sensors embedded so that they actually have their own sort of tracking follow spots, but even though they’re teeny, “they hold and carry a lot of narrative,” Olié says. “I feel like in the post War Horse years, I’ve really always championed puppets playing central characters and also being sort of catalysts for the narrative. And Daniel’s just been so brilliant and trusting in this and kind of explorative that a 15 centimeter puppet can portray one of the most crucial moments of the entire show. It feels very liberating.”
Olié chuckles as he points out how wigs, costumes and shoes are made to be identical across those scales of puppets – and humans. “So we’ve got tiny miniature cuffs and buttons and little tiny glasses and things, so that you just really feel like, ‘Oh yeah, I know who that is’.”
There was plenty of debate about how scary the Goliath’s would be.
(L/R) Fred Davis and Aki Nakagawa with a giant’s hand. Marc Brenner
“Well, this is Roald Dahl, right?,” Evans asks. “And Roald Dahl does have that underbelly, which is I think one of the reasons why he’s so successful because he keys into something that children enjoy. It’s a real fine line between what they enjoy and what they’re genuinely frightened of. And I’m hoping we adhere to that philosophy, which is that there are moments where they should be scared when the big Bloodbottler arrives and he’s going to come right up close to the audience, those in the front row, I think, should be a little terrified. They should be creeping into their parents’ armpits,” says Evans, showing no mercy.
“There’s also, for example, when the giants have their big brawl, there’s another wonderful transition where we actually see their brawl in human scale as well, where they’re basically punching each other, pulling their tongues out, farting in each other’s faces. So it is also kind of silly because that’s another feature of Dahl, which is how he also keys into that childlike humor of just a delight in silliness. And so we have those two things in tandem in Tom Wells’ script,” says Evans, flagging the work created by Olié and in Carolyn Downing’s sound design, “where sound can make us laugh because at the end of the play, they all drink frobscottle and fart.”
I delicately ask Evans how the sound of flatulence is created for The BFG?
“Very realistically,” he trumpets.
“And tunefully,” he adds.
The award winning set designer Vicki Mortimer worked closely with other departments and suggested, Olié says, they go for a look he describes as “a soft sort of familiarity and a threadiness.”
That led the puppeteer to do a deep dive into how humans have been represented through sculpture in a softer way. His mood board featured the work of three artists: Anne Valerie Dupond, from Besançon in Eastern France, whose textile sculptures are created using recovered fabrics; Paris-based Karina Joliet’s soft, and that of Ivan Markovic, a Spanish-Canadian based in Madrid who designs shapes using paper.
Their work inspired Olié to be bold in terms of the look and magnitude. “These puppets are going to be so big that they are sort of pieces of set in this theater sometimes,” he tells us.
Puppeteers control the body of a giant for ‘The BFG’. Marc Brenner
The nasty giants feel more mythic than the BFG, says Olié, so there was a lot of exploration of Nordic trolls, folklore of giants and a study of animal skin textures. We were talking a lot about how giant country is so blisteringly hot…And so we looked at when elephant skin gets all variegated and it gets the pink dappling on it and sort the contrast of when you get brilliant patterning in nature so that those giants felt more kind of the earth and battered by the elements than BFG does. He feels quite refined and that he makes his own clothes and he has given himself a job, whereas they actually feel a little bit more kind of caveman, a bit more like off the soil,” says Olié
Meanwhile, Evans says he’s taken with how Mortimer has lent herself into creating a kind of watercolor swirl on both the floor and on her drapes which gives what he calls “almost a cave of the mind as well as a literal cave because that cave has a kind of metaphorical symbolic sense too that we sometimes have to need to escape from our own caves …and get out of our caves from our primal past.”
Evans likens Mortimer’s swirls to the opening credits of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, especially when they’re enhanced with video designer Akhila Krishnan’s own watercolor swirls.
Again, it was Mortimer, Evans adds, who landed on the idea of having the theatrically “ordinary” world of Sophie and the Queen, the orphanage and the palace – let’s call it reality, and then you have the realm of myth, which is where the giants roam.
And then there’s dream country, which is where Chris Fisher’s illusions come into play.
“It feels really nice that we have three kind of theatrical languages as a kind of backbone running throughout,” Evans reflects.
Evans observes that Shakespeare famously drew a comparison between theater and a dream because theater is like an ice sculpture. “It is built and then it melts away. And as Prospero says in The Tempest, ‘we’re all spirits and melted into thin air,’ just like a dream.”
“Our piece is about dreams. It’s something about leaning into our innate theatricality… that also leans into the audience that are coming and having this kind of vivid dream that then will live in their heads as they go away.”
(L/R) Elsie Laslett, Martha Bailey Vine, Ellemie Shivers, Maisy Lee, Charlotte Jones, and Uma Patel at rehearsal for The BFGG. Image: Marc Brenner.
Handspring made War Horse puppets in South Africa while Olié had his built in Tottenham Hale in North London, which has become a magnet for artists of all stripes.
Puppet co-designers Daisy Beattie and Seb Mayer, a couple who both collaborated with Olié on Animal Farm and Spirited Away, worked with Olié and a team of a puppet makers at a house that Beattie and Mayer bought in Tottenham that needed a lot of work done before they could move in. It was deemed the perfect spot to make plenty of mess before the place was made properly habitable. Every room in their house served a different function, says Olié.
“It was the dream workshop. I was sort of gutted that they actually have to live there,” Olié adds with a grin.
The hope is that audiences will be transported by the mammoth spectacle.
But Evans says that there’s a “big component” he believes will lift the show even further, and that is the show’s score written by composer Oleta Haffner.
“She’s going to take over the world,” Olié marvels when he hears mention of her name.
“Honestly, Baz, she’s given us a kind of John Williams-esque score,” says Evans, as both he and Olié rhapsodise over the ear-inducing music the newcomer has composed for the seven-piece live band that will perform for 70% of the show.
Evans tells me that Haffner has written music that has an epic sweep and predicts that she’s “going to be big news and she’s only in her twenties.”
Elsie Laslett at rehearsal for ‘The BFG’. Marc Brenner
Haffner studied film music composition at the London College of Music. In 2022 she won the inaugural Jonas Gwangwa Music Composition Initiative Award, presented by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, which aims to foster broader representation in composing film music, with an emphasis on Black British talent.
Evans and associates at the RSC have already received interest from producers and theaters in the U.S., Canada, Australia and other territories, “because the book sold 40 million copies worldwide,” Evans states.
The BFG runs in Stratford-upon-Avon until February 7. It will then run at the Chichester Festival Theatre from March 9 through April 11, 2026. The show, produced by the RSC, Chichester Festival Theatre, where Evans was artistic director before being lured to Stratford, the Singapore Repertory Theatre – Esplanade Theatres On the Bay-and the Roald Dahl Company.
The role of Sophie will be shared by Martha Bailey Vine, Elsie Laslett and Ellemie Shivers. Maisy Lee, Charlotte Jones and Uma Patel will share the role of Sophie’s friend Kimberley.
Helena Lymbery plays the Queen.
