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by Selma Dimitrijevic & Tim Carroll, directed by Selma Dimitrijevic

Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

May 25-October 4, 2025

Aslan: “Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know”

The Shaw Festival’s new stage adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe commits that unforgivable sin in theatre for children – it is incredibly boring. This is surprising for several reasons. One is that Tim Carroll, before he was named artistic Director of the Shaw Festival, directed a thoroughly exciting production of LWW for the Stratford Festival in 2016. Another reason is that the Shaw Festival under Carroll has staged three other adaptations of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia novels since 2018. None of these were as imaginative at the Stratford LWW, but none were as tedious as the present LWW. The difference is that at Stratford Carroll directed Adrian Mitchell’s adaptation for the Royal Shakespeare Company. The present adaptation is by Carroll himself and Wales-based director Selma Dimitrijevic, and despite their experience, they seem to have no clue how to make a story for children engaging.

The present Carroll/Dimitrijevic version of LWW fails to make the plays setting or story clear. It’s design is inconsistent and its direction haphazard. It may be that Carroll and Dimitrijevic fail to make the setting clear because they assume children already know the novel. At the beginning of the show, we see the four Pevensie children playing. Suddenly a siren sounds and the children don raincoats and turn up at the house of a Professor Kirke and are instructed by an officious Mrs. Macready. Only if you have read the novel will you know that the four siblings have been evacuated from London in 1940 to the country to protect them from the Blitz.

For most adaptations of LWW the most important event is Aslan’s defeat of the White Witch whose tyrannical reign has plunged Narnia into 100 years of unending winter. The focus of the new adaptation is the coronation of two human boys and two human girls as the Kings and Queens of Narnia. This event, however, will only occur after Aslan defeats the White Witch, so focussing on the coronation de-emphasizes what is the major conflict in the story. This means that signs of the coming conflict are not connected as they should be. We hear that Aslan is coming back to Narnia. We note that the Christmasless 100 years of winter under the White Witch must be ending because Father Christmas appears to the children. And we notice that flowers keep popping up in the castle of the White Witch herself. What the adaptation does not make clear is that Aslan’s return is the cause of the second two events. A battle does ensue between Aslan and the White Witch, though not for any clear reasons and Carroll and Dimitrijevic totally confuse the story’s by having Susan, not Aslan, kill the White Witch.

Further confusion results from Carroll and Dimitrijevic adding a character not in Lewis – the Spirit of Narnia – who appears sometime in Act 2 walking about the stage descanting wordless vocalizations long before Aslan identifies her. The co-adaptors have her, not Aslan, crown the four children and give her the words of Aslan mixed with those of the book’s narrator to explain their new titles.

Even if you have read the novel and understand the setting and the plot, the new adaptation still does not engage the imagination. This is because Dimitrijevic and Carroll convey the information of the story primarily through talk, not action. The worst example of a non-dramatic scene is the meeting of the White Witch and Aslan. The two make a secret agreement in Aslan’s tent while all the other characters simply stand around doing nothing. Rather than waste time this way, why not show the result of the talks (i.e., Aslan’s sacrifice of himself for Edmund) and explain later what happens as in Mitchell?

The design of the show is strangely inconsistent. Some creatures like the Troll, Fenris Ulf and Turnus the Faun wear full-body costumes. For some talking animals like Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, the actor is clad in an animal costume but the head is a hand puppet manipulated by the actor. Yet for Aslan, the most important animal of all, puppetry designer Brendan McMurtry-Howlett has merely put a lion’s mask on the actor’s shoulder, a mask smaller than the beavers’ hand puppet, which means that the most important presence in Narnia has the least physical presence on stage.

In the Shaw’s 2023 production of Prince Caspian, the second published Narnia novel, designer Cory Sincennes created a huge one-man puppet for Aslan that made the character dominate the stage. He also designed extremely clever costumes for all manner of creatures from a centaur, a squirrel, a badger, a mouse, two bears, to walking trees. None of McMurtry-Howlett’s designs come close to Sincennes’s imaginative solutions.

Selma Dimitrijevic’s direction is also inconsistent. Early in Act 1 she has a character address questions directly to the audience and the audience enthusiastically responds. I thought that Dimitrijevic might be giving the show the panto treatment, but after that one example there is no more direct address of the audience. The show contains two songs – one seemingly randomly occurring when the Pevensie children visit the Beavers, the other as a celebration at the end. During the song with the Beavers, Dimitrijevic has three backup singers appear dressed in gowns and elbow-length gloves at standing microphones. Why three humans appear in a scene in Narnia when the Pevensies are meant to be the only humans there is a mystery, and these backup singers never appear again.

Dimitrijevic stages the battle between Aslan and the White Witch using tableaux in silhouette separated by blackouts. Normally when directors use this technique we see some progress in the battle after each blackout. Here the combatants barely move from tableau to tableau making the whole technique pointless.

The actors do their best given the distinctly lacklustre script that Carroll and Dimitrijevic have devised. Jeff Irving, Kristi Frank, Dieter Lische-Parkes and Alexandra Gratton are excellent at playing the four Pevensie children – Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. They do nothing to make their characters appear cute but focus on bringing out the few traits that gives each a personality. Irving emphasizes Peter’s rationality and bravery, Frank Susan’s strength and empathy, Lische-Parkes Edmund’s credulity and remorse and Gratton Lucy’s sprightliness and sense of self-worth.

Shawn Wright and Jade Repeta make a fine pair as Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, their familiar banter revealing the couple’s mutual love and respect. David Adams allows a sly irony to shade his speech as Professor Kirke, something that suggests he knows more about Narnia than he lets on.

Michael Therriault plays the faun Mr. Tumnus as a frightened but conscientious creature. His scene with Gratton as Lucy is the only scene by Carroll and Dimitrijevic that creates drama from the emotions of the characters, in this case Tumnus’s shame about his plan of kidnapping Lucy and Lucy’s forgiveness of Tumnus.

Kelly Wong has a full, rich speaking voice that would be ideal for his role as Aslan if only his costume gave him any glimmer of the grandeur his character is meant to have. As it is, Wong looks more like an impoverished uncle of the Pevensies than a magical spirit. Dimitrijevic could have placed a speaker behind Aslan so that his mighty roar would sound as if it came from him. Instead, the roar plays over the theatre’s loudspeakers and seems totally artificial.

In contrast, Élodie Gillett looks great as the White Witch in Judith Bowden’s icy-white cape and sparkly boots. Unfortunately, Gillett has a thin, pinched speaking voice that totally negates any aura of power or evil that her costume conjures up. Since Gillett is a singer one might think she could better shape her voice to suit her role.

The Shaw Festival’s presentation of stage adaptations of The Chronicles of Narnia has been off-kilter from the beginning. The Festival has staged only four of the seven novels and has staged them out of the chronological order of the events. The first of the Shaw’s Narnia adaptations was The Magician’s Nephew in 2018. That ought to have followed by LWW but instead was followed by The Horse and His Boy in 2019 and Prince Caspian in 2023.

The press release concerning LWW call it “the final entry in the Shaw Festival’s Narnia cycle” which makes any notion of “cycle” as applied to the four plays done out of order a misnomer. With greater forethought, the Shaw could have planned a true cycle of all seven Narnia books with in a unified production. That would have been a major achievement. Yet, if all adaptations of the Narnia books were like the present ill-conceived LWW, it might be better not to stage them at all.

Christopher Hoile

Photo: David Adams as Professor Kirke, Kristi Frank as Susan, Dieter Lische-Parkes as Edmund, Jeff Irving as Peter and Alexandra Gratton as Lucy; Graeme Kitagawa as Fenris Ulf, Élodie Gillett as the White Witch, Dieter Lische-Parkes as Edmund and Daniel Greenberg as Troll; Jeff Irving as Peter, Jade Repeta as Mrs. Beaver, Kristi Frank as Susan, Kelly Wong (roaring) as Aslan and Élodie Gillett as the White Witch. © 2025 David Cooper.

For tickets visit: www.shawfest.com.