James and the Giant Peach
Playhouse, QPAC, until April 7
Lyric Theatre, QPAC
Until May 19
★★★★

Like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but written first, 1961’s James and the Giant Peach is a Roald Dahl story about a boy’s escape from Dickensian squalor into a world of colour, optimism, adventure and deliciousness.

Its wildly fantastic images – a giant peach floating on the sea, savaged by sharks, lifted aloft by seagulls and impaled on the spire of the Empire State Building – would have made it a difficult stage proposition in the days before computerised projections.

But Brisbane’s Shake and Stir theatre company, no strangers to Dahl after adaptations of George’s Marvellous Medicine, Fantastic Mr Fox and The Twits, have the technical smarts and the verve to do it full justice.

Their world premiere production is a giddy hour of children’s entertainment that is just similar enough to a video game or a YouTube Kids video to hold their attention, thanks to the work of video designers/animators Craig Wilkinson and Jake Lodder.

Tragically orphaned by an escaped rhinoceros, James Henry Trotter (Will Carseldine, suitably boyish in short pants) is left to the tender mercies of his horrible aunts Sponge and Spiker (Ellen Bailey and Sarah McIntosh).

The “ghastly hags” of Dahl’s book have been reimagined as cocktail-swilling basics. The amendment allows us to loathe them without having to buy into Dahl’s misogynistic and body-shaming tendencies, although the class politics are a little uneasy.

A mysterious Scotsman hiding in a bush who gifts James with a bag of magical “crocodile tongues” results in the miraculous growth of an enormous peach on the aunts’ otherwise barren tree. James gamely enters the forbidden fruit – into the spider-verse, so to speak.