Roald Dahl and adapted by David Wood

About the Author Roald Dahl
Roald (pronounced Roo-aal) Dahl was born in 1916 in Llandaff, South Wales. His father was a Norwegian shipbroker, painter and horticulturalist who died when Dahl was four. After spells at Llandaff Cathedral School and St Peter's Boarding School, he completed his education at the famous public school, Repton, where one of his teachers wrote: "Vocabulary negligible, sentences mal-constructed. He reminds me of a camel." Although his widowed mother offered to send him to Oxford or Cambridge he chose instead to seek employment with the Shell Oil Company who sent him to Dar-es-Salaam in what is now Tanzania. He served in World War II as a fighter pilot in the R.A.F. (reaching the rank of Wing-Commander) and, when his injuries grounded him, as an attache in Washington. While in America he began his career as a writer of macabre short stories for adults (eventually winning three Edgar Allan Poe Awards from the Mystery Writers of America) and of prize-winning fiction for children. Most of his stories for children were devised originally to entertain the five children he had with his first wife, the actress Patricia Neal. After a thirty year marriage, he divorced her in 1983 and that year married Felicity Crosland. A life-long chocoholic, Dahl died in 1990. Recently the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, has been opened to honour his life and work.

Much of Dahl's short fiction was originally published in prestigious American magazines. The best known collections are Over to You: Ten Stories of Fliers and Flying (1946), Someone Like You (1953), Kiss, Kiss (1959) and Switch Bitch (1974). His adult novels are Sometime Never: A Fable for Supermen (1948) and My Uncle Oswald (1979). A play, The Honeys, was produced in New York in 1955 and a volume of autobiography, Going Solo, appeared in 1986. He co-wrote the screenplays for You Only Live Twice (1967), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) and adapted New Zealand novelist Joy Cowley's Nest in a Falling Tree as The Night Digger (1970).

Dahl's work for children is known for its sudden turns to the fantastic and its harsh treatment of adults who impede his young heroes and heroines. His best known novels for young readers are The Gremlins (1943), James and the Giant Peach (1961), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964, revised 1973), The Magic Finger (1966), Fantastic Mr Fox (1970), Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972), Danny: The Champion of the World (1975), The Enormous Crocodile (1978), The Twits (1980), George's Marvellous Medicine (1981), The BFG (1982), The Witches (1983), The Giraffe and Pelly and Me (1985), Matilda (1988) and Esio Trot (1990). He also wrote volumes of verse for children - Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes (1982), Dirty Beasts (1983) and Rhyme Stew (1989). Boy: Tales of Childhood, an autobiographical work, appeared in 1984.

The Witches was named an Outstanding Book of 1983 by the New York Times, won the 1983 Whitbread Award and the 1986 West Australian Award. It was filmed in 1990 by the great English director, Nicholas Roeg, though the happy ending insisted on by the studio did not please Dahl.
In Writer magazine Dahl claimed: "The writer for children must be a jokey sort of a fellow. He must like simple tricks and jokes and riddles and other childish things. He must be unconventional and inventive. He must have a really first class plot". He often acknowledged that his success with young readers lay in the fact that he conspired with them against adult characters and he believed: "Children are much more vulgar than grownups. They have a coarser sense of humour. They are basically more cruel." He admitted in the New York Times Book Review that children "invariably pick out the most gruesome events as the favourite parts of the books. They don't relate it to life. They enjoy the fantasy. And my nastiness is never gratuitous. It's retribution. Beastly people must be punished.”

About the Adaptor – David Wood
David Wood was born in Sutton, Surrey, in 1944 and educated at Chichester High School for Boys and Worcester College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1966 with a B.A. (Hons). He worked as an actor until 1980, creating the roles of Roger in David Mercer's After Haggerty for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Son in John Mortimer's A Voyage Round My Father and Bingo Little in the Alan Ayckbourn/Andrew Lloyd-Webber musical, Jeeves. He will be best known to Dunedin cinemagoers as Johnny, one of the schoolboy rebels in Lindsay Anderson's 1969 anarchist classic, If…. His other film work includes Aces High, Sweet William and North Sea Hijack. A magician since his schooldays, he has toured his magic show around the United Kingdom for the last 25 years and in 2002 was admitted to the Inner Magic Circle. He was awarded an O.B.E. in 2004.

While at Oxford he contributed songs to the anti-capital punishment student revue, Hang Down Your Head and Die, which transferred into the West End and he contributed lyrics to student, fringe and regional theatre revues during the decade following his graduation. He wrote the book and lyrics for the Tony Hatch/Jackie Trent Rock Nativity, the book for the pre-Mamma Mia Abba musical, Abbacadabra, and the libretto for the opera by Stephen McNeff based on Philip Pullman's Clockwork.

However, it is Wood's writing for children for which he is best known and which resulted in him being dubbed by The Times critic Irving Wardle, 'the National Children's Dramatist'. He has written more than sixty plays in longhand on the back of old scripts and letters, only typing them up when he is satisfied that they are ready for presentation. Often he also writes the music and lyrics for his shows. Among the best known of his original plays for children are The Plotters of Cabbage Patch Corner (1970), Flibberty and the Penguin (1971), The Gingerbread Man (1976, Fortune 1985), and The Selfish Shellfish (1983).

In 1991 he agreed to adapt Roald Dahl's BFG for the stage. Dahl's widow liked it so much that she then approved stage adaptations by Wood of The Witches (1992), The Twits (1999), Fantastic Mr Fox (2001), James and the Giant Peach (2001) and Danny: the Champion of the World (2004).

His many other adaptations include The Tinderbox (1967), The Owl and the Pussycat Went to See (1968), Larry the Lamb in Toytown (1969), Meg and Mog Show (1981), The Old Man of Lochnagar (1986), Dinosaurs and all that Rubbish (1986), Rupert and the Green Dragon (1993), Noddy (1993), Babe the Sheep Pig (1997), Tom's Midnight Garden (2001), Spot's Birthday Party (2002) and Fimbles (2006). He has also written nine Christmas pantomimes for regional theatre companies in Britain.

Wood wrote the screenplays for Swallows and Amazons (1974) and Back Home (1989). He has written for schools' television and adapted Chish ' n' Fips, The Gingerbread Man and The Old Man of Lochnagar for the small screen. His novelty books for children include Bedtime Story and The Magic Show. With Janet Grant he wrote Theatre for Children: A Guide to Writing, Adapting, Directing and Acting (1997) and it has quickly become accepted as a leading textbook in the field.

The Witches premiered at the Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield in October 1992. The production was transferred to a West End theatre and the play has had two subsequent West End productions, the most recent (2005) featuring Ruby Wax as the Grand High Witch. This Fortune production is the play's New Zealand premiere. Wood told Plays and Players as he readied The Witches for production: "Dahl has a key into children's minds which cuts beyond other writers - he has an extraordinary ability to combine the dark and sinister (which kids love) with a core friendship - he takes traditional themes like giants and witches and recycles them like new wine in old bottles. His stories are always totally contemporary and completely plausible - his witches don't fly around on broomsticks but are real, everyday women. I also believe that Dahl wrote for himself which is why he never needed to patronise or qualify".

For many years David Wood also ran his own touring theatre company, Whirligig, which presented productions of his plays in major theatres in the West End and English provincial centres. Although he worked in a Theatre in Education company touring to schools early in his career as an actor, he believes that taking children to experience a production in a fully equipped theatre is the best way to expose them to the power of drama and theatre. He says: "I am trying to give children an exciting, memorable theatre experience by triggering their imaginations, making them laugh and sometimes cry, emotionally involving them in a really good story. I want to use the magic of the theatre - the lighting, the sound, the scenery, the costumes, the music, the movement - to provide a unique, special event."

Roald Dahl