The BFG

Playhouse Theatre, London, from November 13

Twenty years ago, a classic of modern children’s literature appeared in bookshops and changed the image of giants forever. Roald Dahl’s BFG wasn’t a typical giant, of course: given to eating disgusting snozzcumbers instead of crunching “human beans”, the flap-eared BFG established a delightful friendship with orphan Sophie. They shared imagination, badinage, a love of life, and together set out to defeat the nasty flesh-eating giants, Bloodbottler, Bonecruncher and the rest, with the help of the Queen. The Sophie in question was Dahl’s small granddaughter, now famous as a once-voluptuous model, but here earnest, plucky and bespectacled.

A 24ft-tall giant with flexible ears the size of truck wheels, a child small enough to travel in one of the aforesaid marvellous lugs, and the pair of them chatting jauntily to HM the Queen in her bedroom - these wonders we accept with ease in Quentin Blake’s definitive drawings. Blake’s BFG is the Big Friendly Giant; most of us would accept no substitute. So how on earth do you begin attempting to translate text and drawings into a play?

David Wood, doyen of children’s theatre, turned down the challenge three times. “I thought it was virtually impossible to do and I respected the story too much. I think it’s a quite remarkable children’s book. But I eventually came up with a framing device which would allow me to use storytelling theatre. I thought, if I were to go into a school to do a workshop with six or seven-year-olds, we’d do the story somehow. The bossiest little girl would be Sophie. She might pick up a doll and say ‘I’m Sophie too’, then look at me and say ‘You’re the biggest, so you’re the BFG’. I transferred this idea to a birthday party. The entertainer can’t come, but the little birthday girl has been given a copy of her favourite book, The BFG, and the children make their own entertainment.

“This works because the father can be the BFG, the mother the Queen and the friends play giants and assorted characters. You can set it in a child’s bedroom and use the things you’d find in there, introduce a puppet, for instance, and have the giants ‘eating’ soft toys. The wardrobe turns into the BFG’s cave.

“Then,” says Wood, who also directs, “after the interval, everything changes and we are in Buckingham Palace. In the first half, there is one little girl and lots of giants, so she’s a puppet; in the second, there is one giant with lots of ‘human beans’, so we have one puppet again, this time an enormous giant.”

Wood adapted The BFG 10 years ago. Since then, he has turned five other Dahl stories into plays - The Witches, The Twits, Fantastic Mr Fox and James and the Giant Peach - as well as favourites such as Dick King-Smith’s The Sheep-Pig (Babe) and Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden. He always makes a point of being “very, very faithful” to the original, although he does admit to altering the end of The BFG.

“But nobody has picked up on it. I thought it more theatrical for the BFG to decide to go back to his job - blowing dreams into sleeping people’s ears - than to settle in a house in Windsor Great Park. And this allows for a bitter-sweet ending, a parting from Sophie and a promise to meet once a year.

“Yes, I did have Peter Pan in mind when I wrote it. It’s not better in storytelling terms, but it is better play-making.”

Wood knows all about play-making; he has produced more than 60. But first, after Oxford, he was an actor, taking a leading role in Lindsay Anderson’s film of public school anarchy, If, doing a stint at the Royal Shakespeare Company and appearing on children’s television. He still does his one-man magic-and-music show from time to time (“It’s like a workout”), and keeps up to date with developments in the world of magic, a hobby he began aged 10 when an aunt gave him The Boy’s Book of Conjuring. He is a member of the Magic Circle and is delighted to report that he was recently promoted to the Inner Circle, and awarded a gold star in recognition of services to children’s magic.

The effect of The BFG should be magical, but the character is based on at least two real “human beans”. Dahl, as a writer, in a sense put dreams into people’s heads, and Blake’s drawings bare a passing resemblance to his craggy face. It’s well known that the BFG’s sandals were copied by Blake from Dahl’s Norwegian footwear. And, more intriguingly, Wood says that Dahl’s daughter Tessa, (Sophie’s mother), told him it was not unknown for the storyteller to climb precariously on a ladder up to his children’s bedrooms and appear at the window.

There was a countryman who worked for the Dahls. His speech may have been the origin of the BFG’s inventive language so enjoyed by children. Here is the giant describing his attitude to a snozzcumber: “I squoggle it! I mispise it! I dispunge it!”

Human beans of all ages are likely to giggle at the whizzpoppers, the rudely musical results of drinking fizzy frobscottle for breakfast. It’s enough to make the Queen jump.

Tickets: 020 7907 7000. Puffin Modern Classics edition illustrated by Quentin Blake, pound;5.99