Toto the Ninja Cat and the Great Snake Escape – Little Angel Theatre and Touring

Richard Lounds, Charlotte Bloomsbury and Vinnie Monachello in Toto the Ninja Cat and the Great Snake Escape at the Little Angel Theatre, London and Touring. Picture: Ellie Kurttz

Toto the Ninja Cat and the Great Snake Escape was reviewed at the Little Angel Theatre, London where it continues until 19 July 2026. The tour continues until 1 November 2026.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Dermot O’Leary branched out as a children’s author to great success in 2017 by penning Toto the Ninja Cat and the Great Snake Escape, the first in a best-selling series of books inspired by the exploits of his own family’s felines.

The nighttime adventures of karate-kicking cat Toto and her permanently hungry brother Silver in pursuit of an escaped King Cobra snake across the streets of London seemed tailor-made for the stage. And so it proves in this bright, charming and entertaining adaptation for children aged five and over from Little Angel artistic director Samantha Lane and cabaret legend Barb Jungr – even it struggles to fit all the incident and plot from O’Leary’s book into its brief 55-minute running time.

Which means that the pace in Lane’s production is never less than brisk as a talented trio of puppet performers – Charlotte Bloomsbury, Richard Lounds and Vinnie Monachello – bring an array of furry critters characterfully to life. The trio are often seamlessly doubling up and sharing duties on some of the larger of Oliver Hymans and Naomi Oppenheim’s ingenious puppet creations, including star-crossed snake couple Brenda and Brian who often stretch around the set.

Toto and Silver, voiced and operated by Bloomsbury and Lounds – who also double as two zoo keepers who frame the story – make for engagingly cute heroes, even if the origins of Toto’s kung-fu abilities aren’t really explained and the majority of the scrapes that the pair get into are solved by Toto karate kicking anyone who gets in their way. But the kids in the audience will be too absorbed in the story to notice the biographical inconsistencies or the repetition in the story.

The plot kicks into gear when a dandy and aristocratic stray Catface, voiced in an amusingly distinctive and refined, plummy fashion by Monachello – takes the siblings on a whistle-stop tour of London’s landmarks, including a visit to Downing Street, St Paul’s and The Shard, which is described as being the tallest scratching post in Europe. Here the geographical detail from O’Leary’s book, as the trio travel from Camden to London Zoo via the capital’s sewers, really gives the production a sense of place, as do the projections onto a huge Moon that serves as a backdrop to the action, one of a number of striking tableaus conjured up by Sherry Coenen’s evocative lighting designs.

Valeriya Voronkina’s costumes are also beautifully detailed, right down to the egg box armour that adorns one of an army of rat warriors they encounter in the sewers. The puppet designs do a great job of bringing Nick East’s drawings to life.

Jungr’s songs are pleasantly tuneful and move the story effectively along. Best of the bunch is the pleasingly Sherman Brothers-like ditty ‘Come for a Ride on the Tube’, sung by Monachello’s Catface as the trio take the Underground and Hymans’ set consisting of multi-purpose crates conjures up the movement of travel. The catchy theme song for Toto that closes the show is also a foot-tapping delight that sends the kids out on a high.

Having a number of key scenes, including a climactic rescue where Toto helps to release the cobras from the clutches of illegal pet traders, described rather than enacted suggests that there is a longer, two-act version of the show waiting in the wings. The kids in the audience were certainly eager for more, so any extension would certainly be welcome. At the moment, it’s an almost purrfect but pint-sized family treat.

Chris Bartlett