The Roald Dahl Story Company: The Enormous Crocodile

If Only We Were Brave: The Enormous Crocodile Models Hope

An Essay by Paulette Richards

“We’re going to hide from our teacher. Do you promise not to tell?”

Suhayla El-Bushra, who wrote the book for The Enormous Crocodile, and Emily Lin, its director, have filled the show with audience-participation moments that effectively kept even the youngest audience members engaged. The teacher in question had been laying down the rules for a camping trip in the forest when a giant spider landed on her backside. While she screamed in terror, the students violated rule number three—“don’t run off”—and made the audience complicit, so when the teacher recovered herself and asked, “Have you seen any children about this high?” a resounding “No!” arose from the audience.

By this time the Enormous Crocodile (EC) has announced his intention to eat a nice juicy child for lunch, and Chelsea Da Silva, who puppeteers the character, has already amazed the audience with her soulful voice while detailing EC’s “secret plans and clever tricks” for catching such a treat. Four hero characters—Trunky the Elephant (Precious Abimbola), Humpy Rumpy the Hippopotamus (Jordan Eskeisa), Roly Poly Bird (Clara Hudson), and Muggle Wump the Monkey (Marienella Phillips)—clearly recognize the threat EC poses, but they feel powerless and scared—which triggers bouts of flatulence in Humpy Rumpy. Though they all assume “Someone else will stop him,” at first, none of the inhabitants of the forest musters the will to confront EC head on: not the butterflies fluttering on rods in the opening number, not the blue frogs and smaller crocodiles who live in the swamp with the EC, not the various birds who tell EC that children are indigestible and insist there are no children in the forest, as they encourage the children in the audience to make noises like tree frogs, parrots, or river hogs. None of this dissuades the EC from his nefarious quest. He sings a paean to the delights of eating derriere/bum, which sounded rather risqué to my adult ears, though he insists that children “taste better with their clothes on.” The four hero characters then sing “If only we were brave” and recognize that if they’re going to stop the monster, they will have to find courage within themselves. 

The four hero characters could be termed body puppets, but rather than concealing the performers’ bodies, the puppeteers wear costumes that represent their character’s body and carry the puppet’s head in front of their chests (or above the head in the case of Trunky the Elephant).  The sleeves of the Trunky, Humpy Rumpy, and Muggle Wump costumes have the same tropical foliage pattern as the backdrops, so the animal heads seem to emerge from the brush. Hudson, the Roly Poly Bird puppeteer, holds the puppet head with her elbows bent at an angle, which suggests the bird’s neck, while the costume sleeves are blue and white like the Bird’s body. The puppet heads are sculpted from lightweight combinations of high-density foam and painted fabric. These designs allow the cast—who are superb dancers, as well as powerful singers and skillful puppeteers—a greater range of motion and enable them to sustain their high-intensity energy throughout the performance. The pace and excitement, in turn, keep the young audience in their seats—except in the moments when they are explicitly invited to participate in the action.

The action allows each of the hero characters to find the individual talents and strengths they can use to stand up to the Enormous Crocodile. A variety of different puppets represent the EC. In the opening, five puppeteers each manipulate one section of the EC’s body as separate parts.  This configuration shows off their well-rehearsed coordination and emphasizes how large EC is.  Much of the time Da Silva sits on the EC puppet’s back and scoots around stage on a wheeled stool built into the puppet’s body. Yet another EC puppet carries out the first clever trick of disguising himself as a coconut tree. A child sees the tree and is tempted by the coconuts, even though the teacher had explicitly admonished the class, “Don’t eat anything.” Humpy the Hippo warns the girl just in time.  

Next EC presents his tail (a tube of fabric over hoops) as a seesaw. Muggle Wump the Monkey warns the kids before they get too close and then pelts EC with coconuts. Finally, the teacher catches up with the kids and sends them to bed in their tents. She has dropped her hat, however.  EC recovers it and presents himself as her silhouette, but Roly Poly Bird raises the alert before he can get too close to the sleeping campers. Foiled in his efforts to eat the children in the forest, EC threatens to eat the children in the audience and chases Humpy Rumpy, Muggle Wump, and Roly Poly Bird into the orchestra section. Upon entering the theater, however, all the young patrons have been armed with foam peanuts, which the hero characters encourage them to throw at EC as he runs through the house. This piece of audience participation enables everyone to feel brave enough to stop the Enormous Crocodile.

EC remounts the stage to escape the hail of peanuts but encounters Trunky the elephant. Though the teacher had explicitly warned the children not to touch a certain plant because it causes itching, Trunky disables EC by rubbing it in his eyes and then slings him into outer space. EC plunges into the sun and blows up. By combining their talents, the hero characters have routed the great beast. In the rousing finale, they get everyone clapping and dancing to a Caribbean beat in celebration that EC was sizzled up like a sausage.

The backstage tour that Michael Jean-Marrain, the associate puppet director, provided for Catapult members after the matinee on Sunday, February 1, made the advantages enjoyed by  The Enormous Crocodile through having deep corporate pockets abundantly apparent. One Roald Dahl book sells every 2.6 seconds, so when Netflix acquired the Roald Dahl Story Company (RDSC) in 2021, it already had plans to produce nineteen TV shows, films, stage shows, and live experiences based on Dahl’s stories (Sweney, 2021). While most of Dahl’s other tales are for children ages five to twelve, The Enormous Crocodile was suited to a live theater show for younger audiences (three and up). Currently there are two touring companies performing “The Enormous Crocodile.” The production budget offered each the benefit of rehearsing for four weeks and then ironing out all the cues in a week of tech rehearsals.  

The company that performed in Chicago started rehearsals in November 2025, opened in Manchester, and then, unlike many puppeteers who transport their puppets and sets in their checked baggage allotment, the company air-freighted many of the props and sets ahead of the run. With producers handling details like visa appointments, the cast and crew members all had their passports back by Christmas. The core touring company includes two production managers, a stage manager, deputy stage manager, a wardrobe team of two, a sound crew of two, a tech “swing,” and the six performers in the cast, as well as an offstage swing who knows four of the parts. 

Toby Olié and Daisy Beattie, who designed the props and puppets for “The Enormous Crocodile,” not only created an attractive aesthetic, they conscientiously ensured that the performers could operate the puppets without strain. They tested the placement of control grips, chose lightweight materials wherever they could, and designed special safety features into the ladder for the scene where the EC pretends to be a coconut tree. Despite these efforts, the rigors of the show still place some wear and tear on the performers’ bodies. For example, the children who go camping in the forest with their teacher are humanette puppets that require their operators to kneel throughout the scene. The puppeteers are provided with thick kneepads while working these puppets, and company members also have access to physiocare—an unheard of luxury for many American puppeteers who barely have medical insurance to help cover such care.

Though the United Kingdom offers universal healthcare and more public funding for the arts than the United States, during the January 31 Ellen Van Volkenburg symposium panel “Find a Good Reason to Sell Out,” Michael Jean-Marrain described years of working long hours outside of school while earning a musical theater degree. He envied classmates whose parents could afford to pay their living expenses so that they had more time to practice their skills. As a father, he keenly felt the pressure of not knowing what his next job would be after the Enormous Crocodile run ended. For Luke Kelly, grandson of Roald Dahl and former managing director of the Roald Dahl Story Company, being part of a larger company that would enable RDSC to share the stories’ messages of hope with a wider audience was a good reason to sell out (Sweney, 2021). With billionaires snapping up intellectual property and media outlets like “scrummy children,” however, The Enormous Crocodile reminds adults we must be brave if we’re going to stop monsters from devouring our most precious hopes.