Director Timothy Sheader on letting 101 Dalmatians off the leash

It was WC Fields who supposedly coined the famous showbiz adage that you should “never work with children or animals”. Goodness knows what his view would be of working with children, animals, puppets, planes and downpours — but such are the circumstances in which Timothy Sheader, artistic director of the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park, finds himself.

“I just pray for a scene where someone stands still and talks,” he admits genially when we meet early one morning before rehearsals. “And we don’t have any of them.”

The show in question is 101 Dalmatians, the new musical centrepiece of the theatre’s 90th birthday celebrations. Dodie Smith’s 1956 spotty dog story is a staple of millions of childhoods, thanks in large part to the seminal 1961 Disney movie, and last year its regally monstrous villainess took the starring role in the origin-story Cruella. But how does the original tale translate to open-air drama? Surely live theatre can’t reproduce the imaginative scope of the novel or the elasticity of the Disney animation, with its car-crashes and packs of adorable puppies?

On the contrary, argues Sheader: it’s a perfect fit for this theatre, where stories unfurl under the open sky against a backdrop of nodding roses and swaying trees.

“101 Dalmatians is set in Regent’s Park,” he says. “Cruella de Vil lives in a grand house on the Outer Circle [the elegant road running around the central London park] and Primrose Hill is where the dogs do their twilight barking. So it has a coming-home feel to it.”

Even so, here is also the matter of 101 spotty dogs. And that’s before you get to the canine alliance that springs into action to rescue the stolen pups. A pack of hounds on stage, park or no park, seems inadvisable, so while there might just be a fleeting glimpse of a real puppy — “things can get changed in previews”, warns Sheader — the vast majority of dog action will be down to puppets and children: “We have 96 puppets, four children and a dog.”

For Sheader, puppets are not just a practical solution: they also invite you to identify with the dogs. “What the cartoon does brilliantly is what the novel does: it manages to be from the perspective of the dogs,” he says. “And when you go to [actual] dogs that can’t talk, they get sidelined. We have managed to centre the dogs like the cartoon. What I like about puppetry is the invitation to an audience to use their imaginations.”

The task of the stage show, he adds, is to embrace the spirit of the original and translate it to the new medium — but also to bring something fresh. This musical telling of the story, with lyrics by Douglas Hodge and a book by Johnny McKnight, hopes to invest the fantastical, fairytale elements of Smith’s novel with deeper contemporary resonance.

“For me it’s a story of humanity and hope,” says Sheader. “We do make it very clear that we have a choice with these Dalmatians: they can be turned away or they can be let in. We’re definitely trying to stir thoughts of borders and inclusion and people needing to find a safe place to live.”

So where does that leave Cruella de Vil? Cruella gave this arch-villain a back story that went some way to explaining her conduct. But there’s no place for that in this story, says Sheader — she needs to be bad. “There’s an invitation to see in a few lines what might have led her to become like this, but we don’t excuse the choices she’s made.”

For Kate Fleetwood, who plays Cruella, that’s part of the attraction. “I’ve played a lot of villains who I wanted to make as layered and complicated as possible,” she says. “But you need to have some monstrous characters. If we start to redeem everybody then there is no space for that heightened storytelling that is a catharsis for the audience.”

The challenge for her, she adds, is to bring real darkness to a larger-than-life part. “There’s a quality to the design which is kind of comic strip, pop art-ish. So I take that into my body as well. You have to be like Plasticine. You stretch your body and then you can retract again. You zoom in and zoom out.”

101 Dalmatians is built on Sheader’s determination to expand the remit of this much-loved space. The Open Air Theatre launched in 1932 with a staging of Twelfth Night and Shakespeare remained at the core of the theatre’s output for decades. Taking over in 2007, Sheader resolved to combine comedy with darker material and a broader repertoire; to commission living writers to reimagine old stories.

He has been remarkably successful, raising the theatre’s profile, staging award-winning material, children’s shows, opera and challenging musicals. An atmospheric adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies opened with a huge, crumpled plane fuselage embedded in the stage; a dazzling revival of the rock-opera Jesus Christ Superstar channelled the vibe of a music festival.

For Sheader, assembling in the open air to watch live drama harks back to the origins of western drama; fittingly, the theatre will stage its first Greek tragedy this summer with a new version of Sophocles’ Antigone by Inua Ellams. But the director admits that not every play can weather this environment. The space demands a certain scope and energy.

“You need plays that might be reimagined or liberated by no walls,” says Sheader. “Plays that have big ideas that can be volleyed across this tennis court space and sent to the back of the auditorium. They have to be muscular enough and taut enough to be able to make that journey . . . I remember when we programmed The Crucible I was fearful that it would play to the sound of clanging seats. But the combination of that amazingly constructed play and the night sky coming in leaned into the drama. Plays that get progressively darker, so they largely echo the shape of the evening, work well.”

I don’t even check the weather. Because it’s going to change at the last minute

The dusk brings its own magic to the space but it also sometimes brings teeming rain. Sheader has hair-raising stories of swabbing the stage down before dance routines and rushing backstage, mid-show, to announce to a cast that they were dropping the interval to dodge an incoming storm. Does he never hanker for a roof and some walls?

“I don’t,” he says, laughing. “I don’t even check the weather. Because it’s going to change at the last minute. And, after so many years, I embrace that . . . One of the greatest things theatre has as an art form is that it happens in the here and now. In our theatre we might stop for rain in 10 minutes, we might be getting sunstroke because it’s so hot. That’s not for everybody, but I love it. The fact that we are in it together. It’s an event.”

July 12 to August 28, www.openairtheatre.com

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