Who may overlook about Judith Kerr’s egg-eating, burglar-foiling, V.E.T.-fearing Mog? Fuzzy of tail and white of paw, with expectant eyes and loving smile, she has waited greater than 50 years for her stage debut. Fortunately it's theatrical catnip: a pleasant hour that provides songs to Kerr’s tales and is elevated by an uncannily feline efficiency from Hanora Kamen.
Mog, Kerr advised readers, didn’t like issues to be thrilling: “She appreciated them to be the identical.” Her followers might agree in terms of diversifications. Kerr’s elegant story The Tiger Who Got here to Tea has already been changed into a boisterous musical that roars reasonably than purrs. However the Wardrobe Ensemble’s Mog – co-produced with London’s Outdated Vic and Northampton’s Royal and Derngate – honours Kerr’s mix of heat humour, surreal reverie and delicate rumpus.
Laura McEwen’s set design, which has a colored pencil and crayon impact, presents the Thomas household residence as a cutaway doll’s home, with flowers to be trampled on and an armchair to be shredded. A superfluous pet-shop scene with viewers interplay stalls the opening minutes however as soon as Kamen has come via the cat flap the present takes off. With astute motion course from Catriona Giles, Kamen mewls, preens and prowls to the household’s steady affection and exasperation.
There may be an unavoidably episodic narrative however the tales are interspersed with lyrical observations on the altering seasons and the present provides a vivid sense not simply of Mog’s dreamworld however the others’ too: Debbie’s nightmare of a tiger is echoed by a vet’s stressed night time, haunted by visions of poorly pandas and crocodiles.
Composer Joey Hickman, who supplies onstage accompaniment, turns “hassle that cat!” right into a catchy refrain, provides Mr Thomas a loving ode to his favorite chair and perfects a mock-operatic motif to match Mog’s outrage at any change to her routine. A song-and-dance routine at a cat present, which brings extra crowdwork with the younger viewers, begins to pull however Jesse Jones and Helena Middleton’s manufacturing has loads of ingenuity. Actors put on two-sided costumes in a single scene to change between the roles of pets and their house owners.
The palpable onstage bond inside the firm, widespread in Wardrobe Ensemble reveals, helps to make this a warm-hearted portrait of household life and, in fact, the cat’s place inside it – whether or not on the comfiest chair or beneath your toes.
On the Royal and Derngate, Northampton, till 19 June. Touring in 2023.
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