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When Toad escapes from prison dressed as a washerwoman, or so the story
goes, he eludes the posse of weasels and ferrets by jumping aboard a steam
train and then a horse-drawn barge, before finding refuge with Mole and
Badger in Rat’s house deep underground.

Few readers of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows could imagine
this extraordinary tale of creatures in, under and around a river bank,
convincingly performed on the stage. But this is just what is happening
at the Royal National Theatre in London, where the adaptation is playing
to packed houses for the third Christmas running.

Most surprised of all is the playwright commissioned to adapt the tale,
Alan Bennett. ‘My theatrical imagination is pretty limited,’ he says. ‘I
was too set in my ways to be instantly liberated by the technological opportunities
of the commission.’

The opportunities he is talking about are those provided by a remarkable
piece of theatrical machinery, known as the drum revolve stage. This circular
platform, more than 11 metres in diameter, can sink to a depth of 9 metres
below the main stage of the theatre’s Olivier auditorium, and rotate as
it does so. ‘Fast enough to throw actors off if we’re not careful,’ says
Annie Gosney, the Olivier’s production manager.

When the platform rises from its basement complete with set, the Olivier
audience sees a cylinder of scenery ascend from the centre of the main stage
or, with cunning design and lighting, what appears to be the main stage
falling away to expose, for example a scene from ‘deep underground’. In
The Wind in the Willows, the underground set is Rat’s home, which sits directly
on the platform, with tree roots and rabbit burrows above it, and the river
bank on top of that. So when the platform is down, the audience sees the
river bank on stage; when the platform is flush with the stage, they see
Rat’s living room before them.

If the platform rotates as it rises or sinks, the set can look as though
it is ‘corkscrewing’ out of or into the stage. So the audience can follow
characters moving between different levels as well as across them. Toad
finds the gate to Rat’s house by the river bank on the main stage, and then
appears to be working his way down to the front door as the platform rises
higher and higher.

Separate halves of the platform can rise and fall independently, a feature
that lets the stage hands prepare one set below the main stage while another
is on show above. What’s more, around the perimeter of the platform is a
ring, nearly two metres wide, that can rotate with or against the platform.
This rim revolve ‘acts as the river, the road and the railway’, says Mark
Thompson, the play’s designer. ‘We do journeys by moving the two pieces
(the platform and the rim revolve) against each other, or on their own
. . . there are hundreds of chases.’

One of Thompson’s greatest practical problems was coping with a 3-tonne
limit on the load the platform could carry. His preliminary design provided
Rat, Badger and Mole with their own houses on different levels of the platform
but, during early meetings to discuss the idea, he learnt that this was
impossible. The weight restriction meant that the three homes had to occupy
the same shell, with individuality provided by swift scene changes during
the show. Half-a-dozen stage hands have about 15 minutes to completely remake
the interior design of the homes, hauling props in and out of a door at
the back of the set while the action continues above on the other half of
the platform. ‘They’re in shorts . . . and by the end they’re drenched,’
says Gosney.

The materials used to build and furnish the set are among the lightest
available. The set’s structural frame is aluminium, and so is the flooring,
which consists of Aerolam – a honeycomb sandwich of the metal developed
for aircraft. Rectangles of foamed PVC, or Airtex, which is easy to shape
and used by industry for cushioning and sound absorption, appear as prison
wall bricks. Obeche, the West African hardwood, serves as cladding over
which canvas is draped and painted. It is lighter than deal, the timber
usually used for building work.

The overall effect won unanimous support from theatre critics, with
Michael Coveney, The Observer’s seasoned reviewer, expressing amazement
at ‘Rat’s nautical hideaway and Badger’s book-lined den rising out of the
rotating Olivier drum’. And that was before the finale, and Toad’s retaking
of his manor house, Toad Hall.