Our festive offering in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre this winter,Piers Torday’s magical reimagining of John Masefield’s much-loved festive children’s 1935 classic The Box of Delights will run from Tuesday 31 October 2023 until Sunday 7 January 2024. In the busy market-place there were open-air booths selling all manner of matters for Christmas; chiefly woollen mufflers, nailed boots, cloth caps, hedger’s gloves and the twenty-eight-pound cheeses, known as Tatchester Double Stones."

Although not hugely familiar with John Mansfield’s 1935 children’s book, The Box of Delights, and only having a vague memory of the 1984 TV series adaptation, we knew enough of the story as an adventure into a world of magicians and time travel to expect to be blown away by the mystery and illusion of Piers Torday’s adaptation (which had previously run at the atmospheric Wilton’s Music Hall in East London) at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford upon Avon. He told the Guardian: “It is absolutely the case that the first words spoken on the stage of the newly rebuilt Shakespeare Memorial theatre were by Masefield rather than Shakespeare as he was poet laureate. He also had an association with Stratford. He had written a book on Shakespeare in 1911 and was forever going to see productions.”

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To be fair to the BBC, there was an audience for this stuff. I was a well-mannered bourgeois prep-school boy and I had grown up reading these books: Lewis Carroll and E. Nesbit, Richmal Crompton and A. A. Milne. As children we didn’t understand that these things might be out of date or jar with contemporary mores. These were the kind of stories we were given, so these were the kind of stories we wanted. Design will come from RSC Associate and Olivier award-winning Tom Piper, who most recently created the sets for the RSC’s productions of Hamnet in the Swan Theatre and The Tempest in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Spring 2023. I don’t know how I feel about this one, and it may be too soon to tell, as I literally just finished it. Started this as a Christmas Read-Aloud with my kids - I thought it had so much potential - and they DNF’d it. To them it was confusing, and they couldn’t tell what was real and what was not. It seemed like characters went from A to C without telling how they got there or what happened to B. And because they couldn’t tell where it was going and get that invested in the characters, they just weren’t interested. Plus the chapters were long and it didn’t seem Christmas-y at all.

The book that always had the magic of a snowy English Christmas…. It’s still a lovely book, magical and funny, to be read by anybody of any age.” —The Horn Book

Hely-Hutchinson: The BBC man who created the ultimate Christmas music". About the BBC. 13 December 2016.

As an ending, that is; the book itself has plenty of faults along the way. It is a grab bag of early 20th century children’s book tropes, and some just don’t quite work, not at this remove. But some very much do, particularly the snowy, wintry, Christmassy bits. Tis the night before Christmas and little Kay shall become as small and as fast as a bird! and he shall encounter wolves & wizards & witches & thieves! and he shall visit strange places and he shall enter the past and he shall protect his precious Box of Delights and he shall visit a friendly mouse! and he will deal with all of this with a certain nonchalance because it's not like he hasn't done this sort of thing before! The Box of Delights is a children's fantasy novel by John Masefield. It is a sequel to The Midnight Folk, and was first published in 1935. The central character is Kay Harker who, on returning from boarding school, finds himself mixed up in a battle to possess a magical box, which allows the owner to go small (shrink) and go swift (fly), experience magical wonders contained within the box and go into the past.Why does the evil Abner want the Box of Delights? He sure goes to a lot of trouble to get it, but why? We never find out. He steals a lot of jewels, kidnaps a lot of people, and all supposedly to get the Box of Delights. But then he seems content to run off to an island with his jewels, without the Box. Why was the Box so central to his plans if he already had the jewels and his island all prepared? This question is never answered satisfactorily. For it is a cliché. We can probably let Lewis Carroll get away with it in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as it’s a foundational example in children’s literature (and it becomes positively admirable in Through the Looking Glass when Carroll inverts it and Alice is told that she’s nothing but a thing in the Red King’s dream), but even there it’s an unsatisfactory rug-pull. A good mouse tells Kay of the evil Rat's plan to poison the cats at Seekings, and it's all very interesting and exciting, and devious plans laid by the evil gang of Rats. And then it NEVER happens. The cats are never mentioned again, like they never existed. What is happening here? What is wrong with this plot?