The Velveteen Rabbit – Lyric Theatre, Belfast

Tara Wilkes and Jack Watson in The Velveteen Rabbit at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast. Picture Carrie Davenport

The Velveteen Rabbit continues at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast until 30 March 2025.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Margery Williams’ classic children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit charms its way onto the stage in a lively adaptation by Jan Carson and Duke Special as cosy as a bedtime story, as colourful as a pantomime, and as pleasing as a parent’s reassuring hug.

Presented by Belfast’s young audience-focused Replay Theatre Company and hosts, the Lyric Theatre, it serves as the flagship theatre offering of Young at Art’s Belfast Children’s Festival.

Published in 1921, Williams’ tale of a young boy and his favourite toy – a rabbit who yearns to become real – is one of the most enduring examples of that perennial fantasy of playthings coming to life when no one is looking. It’s a lineage that stretches from Collodi’s Pinocchio and Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker to Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and Pixar’s Toy Story.

The Velveteen Rabbit marks a first collaboration between two native talents, short story writer and novelist Jan Carson and singer-songwriter and composer Peter Wilson, better known as Duke Special. It also marks Carson’s first foray into theatre.

Staying largely faithful to Williams’ story, Carson relocates its setting to 1980s Northern Ireland, the time and place of her own formative childhood. Laced with audience-pleasing local idioms and references, she also adroitly plays to her dual audience of children and adults, the latter afforded sly innuendos that wouldn’t be out of place in panto.

Where there are excusable structural and tonal bumps along the way, she succeeds in recognising the “grown-up thoughts” underpinning the original fable as innocence gives way to complexity.

It’s an eternal conundrum underlined with sensitivity by Duke Special, whose theatre credits range from Mother Courage and Her Children at the National Theatre in 2009 to collaborations with British Youth Music Theatre, including Gulliver’s Travels, seen at the Lyric in 2017.

Here, remaining true to his un-categorisable self, his score is a signature amalgam of rock, ballad, electronica, ambient and snatches of various other telling idioms. Blending pre-recorded, synth-accented embellishments with the six-strong cast doubling as a live onstage band, the result is as beguilingly touching as it is bracingly involving. All are subtly integrated and spun out by musical director Garth McConaghie in a turn-on-a-sixpence veering between rousing, forward-looking energy and aching nostalgia.

Janice Kernoghan-Reid’s direction balances Carson and Duke Special’s appeal to all ages, Diana Ennis’ set and costume designs tap into the colour-saturated immediacy of younger viewers and the faded, nostalgic pigments of their elders.

Making her professional debut as the ‘Wee Man’, Tara Wilkes makes an impressive first impression for her nuanced appreciation of a combustible eight-year-old boy’s changes of moods and the sheer vitality of her performance.

There are notable contributions from Darren Franklin’s been-there, done-that narrator-cum-commentator Jack-in-the-box, Allison Harding’s cartoonish space hopper, aged and wise Skin Horse, and, alongside Reuben Browne, a real-life bunny, both as as mad as March hares.

Rosie Barry captures the stuttering motion and electronic irritability of the proudly hubristic Robbo – “all the best toys have batteries” – with aplomb, winning the biggest ovation of the night in her grandstanding solo as the Nursery Magic Fairy.

Growing up faster than his boisterous owner, Jack Watson’s eponymous rabbit occasionally risks being eclipsed by larger supporting characters, but his transition from dependent toy to independent, flesh-and-fur reality is marked with touching sensitivity.

The production’s tagline, “A boy, his favourite toy, and how love makes us real”, is touchingly, satisfyingly, realised.

Michael Quinn