The crucial daemons, designed and directed by Barnaby Dixon, are more intimate than spectacular: a lemur coiled round a neck, a snake uncurling across the stage, our hero’s companion shifting (how?) from kingfisher to cat in full view of the audience. Its layers, and its twisting between the antique and the futuristic, are suggested here in Paul Arditti’s delicately thrumming sound design and by Luke Halls’s videos and Jon Clark’s lighting, which swirl over and transform Bob Crowley’s sets: placid-looking woodcut scenery seems to splinter and break apart as a great flood (the Bible is never far from Pullman’s agnostic mind) rushes across the stage.Īmong the speed there is inwardness. Pullman’s novel, set before His Dark Materials, with Lyra as a baby being protected by potboy and potgirl Malcolm and Alice, swims between the familiar and the fantastic: it is a rush of climate catastrophe, adventure, alethiometers, Oxford cityscapes, pubescent stirrings and the repressions imposed by an ironclad Christian regime. This is only one of the ways in which Nicholas Hytner’s exciting production (co-directed with Emily Burns and James Cousins) gets things right. “How do you know about the uncertainty principle?” “I live in a pub.” Clear and swift, it brings an extra bounce of humour to the tangle of speculation and saltiness that makes the novel at once provoking and compelling.

I s Bryony Lavery Philip Pullman’s daemon? Her adaptation of La Belle Sauvage goes to the heart of the first volume of Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy and, daemon-like, expresses its essence.

The book of dust theatre