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by A.A. Milne, adapted & directed by Fiona Sauder

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

July 12–September 27, 2026

Rat: “There is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing about by a river”

As this season’s children’s play, the Shaw Festival is presenting The Wind in the Willows adapted by Fiona Sauder. Sauder is not adapting Kenneth Graham’s beloved 1908 novel directly. She is, in fact, adapting a previous adaptation of the novel called Toad of Toad Hall (1929) by A.A. Milne, the author famous for writing Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). Toad of Toad Hallis the more accurate title since, as Milne says, he chose only the incidents in The Wind in the Willows that concern the character Toad. Sauder primarily edits Milne’s play to make it shorter although certain dynamics among the animals are lost. The main benefits of Sauder’s production are the fantastic set by Judith Bowden and delightful costumes by Laura Delchiaro. The main drawback is an intensely annoying performance in the central role.

Unlike Graham’s novel, but following Milne’s text, Sauder begins the play by presenting us with the little girl Marigold on a riverbank trying to evade her Nurse. Marigold is fascinated with the creatures who live there in her view, “They are as human to themselves as we are to us” a great way to justify depicting anthropomorphized animals. After a sudden blackout we are in the riverbank world Marigold was speaking of. The first creature we meet is Mole, who is new to the riverbank society. Then we meet Rat, who has long been resident there, followed by Badger, who has lived there even longer.

The three are about to sit down for a picnic when Toad joins them and shows off his latest craze, a carriage. All begin to travel to Toad Hall when in another blackout the carriage is struck by a motor car driven by Chief Weasel. In a daze after the accident, Toad adopt a new craze for motor cars. When we next hear of Toad, his craze for motor cars has led to several crashes. He is brought before the court and sentenced to prison. Whether Toad escapes from prison and whether he and his friends can scare away the Wessels and Stoats who have taken over Toad Hall I will leave to potential audience members to discover for themselves.

Judith Bowden’s impressive set features huge open flowers that hang so low tall people may have to duck under them. Initially we think they will block our view of the stage, but when the action begins, they are hoisted upwards. The flowers make so strong an impression of spring that Sauder finds it difficult to shift to the scenes of winter that begin with Act 2, Scene 2. She keeps Milne’s Field Mice that want to sing a Christmas carol and she shoves out what look like two waist-high sculptures of pine trees, but the flowers still hanging from the ceiling are still present and no characters, except the Mice have any costume change to suggest it is winter. In fact, I wondered why the mice wanted to sing Christmas carols when it was still spring.

The passage is important because Toad’s craze has not only taken hold but he has already bought and crashed eight of his motor cars. The last we time we saw Toad he was in his carriage. Since Sauder did not signal strongly enough that two seasons had passed, I wondered how Toad could already have crashed so many cars.

While Sauder has kept much of Milne’s text intact, she does omit certain section that help clarify the action. Milne has an Epilogue in which he notes, “it is spring again”. Toad and his friends pass across the stage and Nurse wakes up Marigold who is sleeping. This short scene indicates both that we have cycled through all the seasons and that all we have seen is Marigold’s dream. Sauder omits the Epilogue and instead has Nurse and Marigold and the Weasels join in the general dance that ends the play. This makes no sense since we wonder what Nurse and Marigold have been doing since the beginning of the play. Besides this, how are the Weasels now friends with Toad and company who have just kicked them out of Toad Hall?

Sauder also cuts the many “war songs” of the Weasels and Stoats against Toad that begin as early as the middle of Act 1, Scene 2 before the crash of the motor car and the carriage. These songs by the “Wild Wooders” show that they are a real threat and create a tension between the Wild Wooders and the Riverbank animals that we otherwise only hear about but do not experience. When Sauder presents us with a strange scene lit only by lantern light, we don’t know what it’s about.

In spite of this, virtually all the roles are well played. As Rat, Sharry Flett embodies the whole spirit of warmth and friendship that the book celebrates. She makes Rat a genial figure who shows good will to all. A chief benefactor of this good will is Mole, played by Gabriella Sundar Singh, as a shy, curious creature who wants to learn more about the outside world. As Badger, Shawn Wright is a gently humorous character, aged but full of good cheer and tending to dwell more on the past than the present. The scenes with these three that begin the play set up the mood of a happy, carefree life.

This mood is immediately shattered by the appearance of Toad. His combination of eccentricity with egocentricity naturally contrasts with the nature of his three friends. Unfortunately, Lawrence Libor’s Toad is so over the top it leaps over the wall of acceptability from the desired side of humour to the undesired side of annoyance. Libor adopts a funny voice, screeches his lines, jumps up, twists, falls, all for no reason. His Toad is so loud, so brash, so self-centred, it’s impossible to believe that Rat, Mole and Badger would want anything to do with him, much less be his friends. In the play Rat describes Toad as “So simple, so good-natured, so affectionate”, Sauder and Libor ensure that we witness nothing of the sort. With a central character so obnoxious, we really don’t care what happens to him which thus prevents us from being drawn into the play.

The afternoon I attended Dillan Chidlow replaced Taurian Teelucksingh as Alfred the Horse and displayed both a strong personality and a strong singing voice. The interplay of Qasim Khan as the owl-like Judge and Graeme Kitagawa as the Usher proves the high point of humour in the show. Sara Farb and Jacqueline Thair are cute as the two Field Mice, but they make their voices so high and squeaky that we have no idea what they are saying.

By placing ears on hats and having tails stick out of breeches or skirts, Laura Delchiaro chooses a lovely, subdued manner of indicating that these animals in late 19th-century clothing are as human as they think they are. Milne’s play was popular from its premiere on and in the 1960s and ‘70s became an annually staged Christmas play that featured some of the most famous English actors of the period. I can see that Milne’s play needs some trimming. But cuts and staging that make the action hard to understand and a main character who is more repellant than fun does not make this version of Toad of Toad Hall (or The Wind in the Willows) anything a child would want to see more than once, if that.

Christopher Hoile

Photo: Lawrence Libor as Toad with ensemble; Sharry Flett as Rat; Graeme Kitigawa, Sara Farb, Jacqueline Thair and Taurian Teelucksingh; Lawrence Libor as Toad. © 2026 Michael Cooper.

For tickets visit: www.shawfest.com