Since the Unicorn’s big Christmas show was announced, the career of writer Neil Gaiman – the author of the novel Odd and the Frost Giants is adapted from – appears to have more or less imploded under allegations of sexual misconduct. Not the ideal sentence to kick off a review of a piece of kids’ theatre. But I suppose it’s worth acknowledging it straight up rather than praise Gaiman and ignore the allegations, or pretend that his empathetic eye for writing about childhood isn’t at the heart of this show’s success (sturdy as Robert Alan Evan’s adaptation is). It was a coup for the Unicorn to bag a Gaiman adaptation because his writing is very good – sadly it now feels icky to acknowledge that.
Odd (Archee Aitch Wylee) is a young Viking lad with a limp and a tyrannical stepfather. A dreamer whose physical frailties limit his capacity for classic Viking business, he spends his time playing with the wooden carvings of the Norse gods his late father left for him. As the story begins his stepfather is in a fury with him for not having filled up the waterbutts before a deep, unnatural freeze set in.
Upset, Odd storms off into the snow to try and find his father’s old hut; there he comes across a peculiar assortment of animals - a fox, a bear and a one-eyed eagle. Long story short, it turns out they are Loki, Thor and Odin, their bodies transformed by a frost giant who tricked them and cast them out of their godly home of Asgard.
Aimed at ages seven-plus, Rachel Bagshaw’s production has an impressive wintry grandeur to it, with huge feathery pillars of white descending from the ceiling of Milla Clarke’s set like pillars of squishy ice, and a lovely bubbling electronic score from Beth Duke.
It’s also often very funny – Georgia Frost is particularly entertaining as a swaggering, Liam Gallagher-alike Thor; the multi role-playing Sam Pay is good value as the victorious frost giant whose triumph over the gods has actually left him feeling rather depressed and miserable.
Like a lot of kids' theatre, Odd and the Frost Giants is ultimately a story about self-acceptance and being yourself, something that can often come across as rather cringe (in my experience children are told to be themselves almost constantly, they get it). But here it’s handled with nuance, humour and invention. Without their powers, the gods need to adjust to the considerable joys of simply being alive, in the same way Odd needs to square up to the fact he’s never going to be a mighty warrior… but it’s okay because he has other talents. Funny, heartwarming, action-packed and doused in snow, it may concern pagan gods, but it’s a perfect Christmas show.