The Light Princess

Occasionally, a show opens that divides critics and audiences as radically as Marmite. The National Theatre’s The Light Princess did that last week, but I confess my guest fled, muttering – insufficiently sotto voce – that he hated musicals and fairytales and this was torture twice over.

Like most fairytales, George MacDonald’s The Light Princess is about a motherless child finding out who she really is and then recognising her prince. But this is a new one to me, as indeed is singer-songwriter Tori Amos, who created the score and sounds like a more folksy Kate Bush.

The rather inspired idea of the story is that, following her mother’s death, Althea pushes light-heartedness and airheadness to its extremes and becomes completely weightless, defying gravity. It’s a metaphor, I think, for Althea’s emotional anorexia, a fear of feeling anything in case it hurts too much. For most of the production, the feet of Rosalie Craig’s Althea barely touch the floor, but for the time when her legs are clad in leaden calipers.

Sometimes she is tethered by a ribbon tied to her willowy ankle or wrist like a balloon, but more often she is balanced on the strong arms and legs of a quartet of acrobats in black who pop out of hatches and through bookshelves to catch her and keep her from floating away. Supine, upside-down, suspended on wires, she misses not a note.

This transfixing creature is the reason for seeing this show, though there is much more to enjoy in Rae Smith’s brightly coloured, glittering greetings card- like designs. Indeed, the team that created War Horse, has reunited and once again delights with fanciful, fantastical puppets, including a mouse with a coat made of swinging fringe, and trademark birds swooping at the ends of bendy poles.

Billowing blue parachute silk becomes a lake; lengths of navy elastic a pond on which rather rude water lilies show their parts and frogs get it on.

Althea’s prince, who inhabits the kingdom of Sealand, enemy to her kingdom of Lagobel, is the splendidly muscular Digby (Nick Hendrix), who has, in sharp contrast to Althea, responded to his mother’s death by becoming heavy-hearted and leaden. Needless to say, war is waged and these opposites attract and no surprise, but the princess acquires the gravity she needs, then finds a lightness of spirit.

Admittedly, the show is more panto than grim fairytale, the orchestra is too small and too many of the lines end with ‘H2O’ presumably because it rhymes more readily than ‘water’. But I was nevertheless ravished and entranced by Althea and floated out of the theatre on a wave of euphoria and hovered home, feet never touching the pavement.

Until 9 January 2014 at the Lyttelton Theatre, South Bank, London SE1: 020-7452 3000, www.nationaltheatre.org.uk