This Shaw Festival adaptation of A.A. Milne's children's play is eye-popping — but with a perturbing moral lesson

Yet that’s what happened at my performance of “The Wind in the Willows,” currently running at the Shaw Festival. 

As I peered around the auditorium toward the end of the play’s first act, I could see kids, once sitting up attentively at the top of the show, now rustling impatiently, slinking down in their seats or entirely curled up in their parents’ arms. 

Much can be said about children’s attention spans these days — increased screen time, lack of in-person interaction, and so on and so forth. There’s certainly a time and place for that conversation. But as far as I’m concerned, what I saw at Sunday’s performance has nothing to do with shortened attention spans and everything to do with the material itself. 

Put bluntly: A.A. Milne’s 1929 play is a tiresome slog that’s nearly as verbose as a Shavian drama, yet with none of Shaw’s wit nor thematic intellect. And Fiona Sauder’s new adaptation, which merely tinkers with Milne’s work with the lightness of a makeup brush, does little to make this story any more engaging. (In some ways, it actually makes things worse.) 

Milne’s play, titled “Toad of Toad Hall,” was inspired by “The Wind in the Willows,” a children’s book by the British novelist Kenneth Grahame. Sauder’s adaptation, which uses Grahame’s title, keeps the original narrative more or less intact. 

Its conceited, self-absorbed protagonist is Lawrence Libor’s Toad, who has a penchant for racing fast cars. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t take long for him to have a run-in with the fuzz and be thrown into the slammer.

Toad’s magnificent estate, Toad Hall, is also soon repossessed by a horde of conniving weasels (led by Matt Alfano). And all Toad is left with are his friends — Rat (Sharry Flett), Mole (Gabriella Sundar Singh) and Badger (Shawn Wright) — who band together to help save him and reclaim Toad Hall. 

It’s a colourful, adventurous tale. But not much of that comes through in the script: the dialogue is often pedantic, sluggishly moving from scene to scene. Not even the jaunty musical interludes (composed by Jeff Newberry, with choreography by Jack Davidson) can quicken the pacing. 

Sauder only makes some cosmetic changes to Milne’s play. She shortens, though still keeps, his extraneous prologue and epilogue, which feature two completely unnecessary characters not from the original novel — a young girl named Marigold (Jaden Kim) and her nurse (Allison McCaughey). She also beefs up several supporting roles (Flett’s Rat is a more headstrong compared to the version in Milne’s adaptation), but this means some scenes are even more drawn out than before. 

Perhaps the most confounding change, however, is Sauder’s decision to move the play’s intermission to what was previously the middle of the third act in Milne’s adaptation. (Now, the show is so lopsided that the first half is nearly twice as long as what comes after the interval.)

Sauder only makes some cosmetic changes to Milne’s play. She shortens, though still keeps, his extraneous prologue and epilogue, which feature two completely unnecessary characters not from the original novel — a young girl named Marigold (Jaden Kim) and her nurse (Allison McCaughey). She also beefs up several supporting roles (Flett’s Rat is more headstrong than the version in Milne’s adaptation), but this means some scenes are even more drawn out than before.

Libor, as well, is a magnetic presence on stage. In a performance of immense bravura and swagger as Toad, he resembles not so much a lazy toad but a bullfrog who’s just downed some Red Bull. 

But neither Libor’s performance nor Sauder’s direction can compensate for the weaknesses inherent to the material. 

For me, there’s also something quite unsettling about Grahame’s original story — and it’s still present in both Milne’s and Sauder’s adaptations: “The Wind in the Willows” can really be read as a class allegory, with Toad representing the English aristocracy and the weasels standing in for the “uncultured” working class.

But what Grahame (who was a well-to-do banker) has to say is troubling: What he advocates for is the preservation of social and class hierarchies. He also argues that the well-connected rich, who, much like Toad, have friends in high places, can also flout the rules with little consequence. 

Maybe it’s for the best that by the time these themes become apparent, the kids in the audience are already completely out of it.