The Lorax

Dr Seuss, best known for The Cat In The Hat, is the pen name of the American writer Theodor Seuss Geisel, who died in 1991, but whose work lives on. Like Maurice Sendak and Judith Kerr, he illustrated his own stories, and they are delightful, idiosyncratic, and always moralistic.

The Lorax, for instance, is a nice little chap who both talks to the trees and tries to save them. He pops up – indeed out of their trunks – when they are cut down. He’s the conscience of preservation as we lay waste to our forests, and in The Old Vic’s wonderfully entertaining (two-hour) stage adaptation, he’s a lozenge-shaped puppet – manipulated, ironically, by three humans – with a big yellow walrus moustache.

One of the human actors (the adept musical theatre expert Simon Lipkin) says the Lorax’s lines and sings his songs, giving the voice of the natural world a slightly unreal quality; while the opposing force of destruction, represented by the scrawny, skinny Once-ler (Simon Paisley Day), is an all too familiar figure of progress, industrialisation and material greed.

Sounds too ‘political’? Maybe it is, but mostly in a good way. For the Once-ler is not as nasty as he’s cracked up to be: he, too, is in a struggle for survival in a hostile world. It’s just that he, well, cuts down trees, scatters the wildlife and creates so many jobs in such a huge and fume-belching factory that his master plan for mankind misfires madly.

As in the book, playwright David Greig’s lively and imaginative adaptation has a little boy (here played by a girl attired in West Ham colours) asking the now reclusive Onceler what has happened in this devastated landscape. And Max Webster’s brilliant, energetic production responds with multicoloured visual evidence of gasping fish, flying birds, dying swans and a nightmare industrial scenario where the tufts of the beautiful Truffula trees are pummelled into skeins of wool and knitted into a supposedly in-demand item called a ‘thneed’. What is a thneed, and who thneeds it?

Animals and humans are on the run in this environmental nightmare presented as an edgy, but intelligent, musical, which is why, supposedly, it is deemed unsuitable for children under the age of six. The songs are by Charlie Fink, former lead singer with Noah And The Whale, the choreography by Drew McOnie, while the designs by Rob Howell and puppetry by Finn Caldwell are terrific.
 
Until 16 January at The Old Vic (not recommended for children aged under six), The Cut, London SE1: 0844-871 7628 www.oldvictheatre.com