4/5
Storytelling, as Trevor Nunn points out, has never gone away. But now the director who has, for so long, enjoyed the full battery of modern theatrical gadgetry has gone back to bare essentials in his adaptation of the award-winning children's book.
It's a felicitous homecoming, not least because Nunn is back at the place whose Christmas shows have become legendary since Tim Supple revived the art of theatrical storytelling with his versions of Grimm fairy tales and others.
Here, too, in the centre of David Almond's magical Geordie fairy tale as the mysterious tramp, Skellig, sits the bedraggled figure of David Threlfall, Nunn's original Smike in his record-breaking, ''storytelling'' production of Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby.
Since then, many others have copied its multi-voiced narrating style and Skellig, moving at a sure but hectic pace as Almond's extra-ordinary and everyday tale unfolds and takes flight, shows Nunn has lost none of his touch.
Unfortunately, he has also not been able to resist the bad habit of recent years of turning everything to music; in this case, the brief quotations from William Blake.
Skellig doesn't need it. Almond's wonderful mix, as young Michael encounters birth, death, ageing (there is a wonderful zimmer frame dance) and discovers the half-human, half-bird, half-angel that is Skellig, carries its own force.
Nor will there be anything more transcendent this Christmas than the moment when Kevin Wathen's Michael and Akiya Henry's Mina, their faces wreathed in quiet joy, join hands with Threlfall's Skellig, a look of wonder permeating his features, and together all three slowly rotate above the stage - magic in motion.
Skellig is supported by UBS.
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