Mum is brave and strong but also a little manic Dad is kind yet absent and Lucy’s brother is a slightly nutty law unto himself.

Katie Haygarth, Elisa De Grey, Michael Fowkes and Matthew Churcher do a brilliant job of fading into the background, all dressed in black, while still injecting their puppets with such personality. Blue absolutely adores the carnage but her body is stiff as a board as she laughs. They dance the conga, scoff Mum’s jam, dress up in silly costumes and slide down the stairs. With the family cowering in the bottom of the garden, the wolves run riot. When the wolves finally burst through the walls, they rip through the screens with a Stephen King-like viciousness. Even the light relief, when it comes, isn’t all that light. They’re hard and edgy numbers, with barely a melody but a dark and persistent pulse. Family is so often depicted as a comfort in children’s fiction but here Lucy’s family is seen as something much more complicated very much in Lucy’s life but distracted, too, and never completely present for this curious young girl.Īdam Pleeth’s songs, with lyrics by Carl Grose, are not your typically family theatre fare either. When we finally see the family members, their puppets only have an upper torso. Lucy’s family start out as merely background noise: we hear Mum singing, Dad playing the tuba (terribly), and Lucy’s brother bashing away at his games console.

Olié’s production persuasively captures the potential loneliness of childhood. Nothing in Lucy’s world is solid – expect perhaps Lucy, who is represented by a delicately carved wooden puppet. Lucy finds she is walking on thin air … Katie Haygarth (Lucy) in The Wolves in the Walls.

Dave mckean wolves in the walls