Royal Shakespeare Company excited to stage Roald Dahl's ‘inspirational' BFG
Daniel Evans is directing the production about the Big Friendly Giant who captures an orphan named Sophie and brings her back to his home in Giant Country.
The new stage adaptation by playwright Tom Wells will delight families over the festive period, kicking off a 10-week run at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon from November 25 to January 31 before moving to the Chichester Festival Theatre next Spring.
Reflecting on the challenges of retelling Dahl's beloved story, Evans told the PA news agency: 'First of all, you have to put giants on stage, and second, you have to put dreams on stage.
'They have to float through the air and go into jars and trumpets and be blown into people's ears, they're enough of a challenge.'
He added: 'I'm just very, very excited because it's a really inspirational story about an orphan girl who teams up with a giant and a Queen to beat the baddies, and hopefully there'll be magic.'
The story from the 1982 children's novel by British author Dahl follows the kind-hearted and big-eared BFG, who kidnaps young Sophie from an orphanage.
While the BFG is a gentle soul, his home in Giant Country is full of much bigger giants including Fleshlumpeater and Meatdripper, who pick on the BFG and feast on humans.
Sophie and the BFG team up on an unlikely adventure which takes them to Dream Country and Buckingham Palace, where they meet the Queen and try to enlist her help to save children everywhere.
Evans and and his RSC co-artistic director Tamara Harvey said it was a 'dream come true' for them to collaborate with The Roald Dahl Story Company and Chichester Festival Theatre on the adaptation.
The book has previously been adapted for the 2016 fantasy adventure film which was directed and co-produced by Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Spielberg and starred Sir Mark Rylance as the BFG and Ruby Barnhill as Sophie.
An earlier animated version from Cosgrove Hall productions in 1989 featured the voice of Sir David Jason as the BFG.
Other popular Dahl books have also been adapted for the stage, with The Witches previously showing at the National Theatre, while a production of The Enormous Crocodile was staged at Leeds Playhouse.
Roald Dahl Story Company artistic director Jenny Worton said The BFG 'opens a magical new chapter' for the company following the success of the previous shows.
'Our dream is to bring mischievous joy to audiences of all ages through our growing family of live shows,' she added.
'After years of delicious inventing with Tom Wells, Daniel Evans, and the wider creative team, we are excited to share our passion for this iconic story with the rest of the world.
'Alongside Chichester Festival Theatre, we've created something full of imagination and heart, just as you'd expect from the world of Roald Dahl.'
Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey share their summer 2025 season and big friendly festive show 🎉
We can't wait for you to join us pic.twitter.com/JwuGQlIgTK
— The RSC (@TheRSC) January 29, 2025
Royal Shakespeare Company's 2025/26 programme also features three adaptations of the classic tragedy Hamlet and a host of other Shakespearean productions.
It was previously announced Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke is reworking the band's album Hail To The Thief for a new stage production of Hamlet.
Also among the line-up is nationwide tours of Rupert Goold's adaption of Hamlet and First Encounters: King Lear.
There will be a 80-minute staging of Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona as well as Tim Crouch's I, Peaseblossom – his hit adaptation of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
The programme also includes interactive theatre workshops, free drop-in activities, family theatre trails, and the return of the RSC's acting-based Summer schools for ages eight to 14 and 18-25.
Discussing their programme, Harvey told PA: 'One of our core responsibilities as a National Theatre is to ensure that as many people as possible can see our work, and that's from the very old to the very young.'
Priority booking for the BFG production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre opens from 10am on Friday January 31, with public booking opening at 10am on February 12. Tickets for the Chichester Festival Theatre will open in September.
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Highlights from the episode On the family recipe she has preserved "I have a recipe of my grandmother's that I have framed — her pound cake recipe. There is sugar on it. It's her writing. Her, sugar, butter, might be a little piece of dried Crisco or something. But the paper is starting to come apart. That's what made me frame it. That recipe that she had written down has got to be probably 40 years old." On what solo travel taught her "The first time I went to France, I went by myself. The only downfall was that I didn't stay long enough. It was eight days and I went with no itinerary. I just fell into things. And one of the things that I realized is when you are traveling by yourself, or when you're putting yourself in a space that is foreign to you, you actually are more open because you're listening more. I was able to start hearing the difference between accents from different parts of France. I would've never been so keen to that sound if I was with someone, because we would've been talking. You don't have to follow anybody else's desires of what they're interested in checking out. You get to move at your own pace. And that trip just opened me up in a way that made me want to do more things by myself, to be in spaces where I was truly paying attention." On not becoming a dentist "I don't think that I was looking at it like, one day I am going to be on Broadway, or one day I am going to be in movies. It just literally was something that I enjoyed doing. For the most part, I was a kid that liked to daydream. But all of my daydreams were me as an adult with two children, and I was either a dentist or a flight attendant. I never was thinking about being on television. I like to say that thank God the acting found me." Related: I Remember My Mother With Love, Carrot Sticks, and a Crappy Bowl of Spaghetti On making new memories "I'd never ever thought about being in this space. 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Download the Transcript Editor's Note: The transcript for download does not go through our standard editorial process and may contain inaccuracies and grammatical errors. Read the original article on Food & Wine
