Hex, National Theatre, review: A captivating mix of magical and macabre

Hex was seeming the victim of a curse itself last Christmas when Covid related illness among the cast heavily disrupted the first week of preview performances and then shut down the production completely before opening night.

It's also been dogged by accusations of nepotism: Tanya Ronder, who wrote the book, is married to Rufus Norris, the National's artistic director who wrote the lyrics and also directs. In fact, Hex is a reworked musical version of the Sleeping Beauty Norris staged at the Young Vic in 2002 and, plays, largely triumphantly, to his somewhat underused strengths as a director during his tenure at the National: namely spectacular, highly theatrical storytelling that thrives on the uncanny mix between the magical and the macabre.

Ronder's pleasingly irreverent book draws primarily on a 17th century incarnation of the Sleeping Beauty myth, which contains a not so happy ever after Part 2 concerning Beauty's new mother-in-law, Queenie, literally an ogress with a hunger for human meat who regards her new born baby grandchildren as a means of satiating her vengeful jealously against her unwanted new daughter-in-law (Rosie Graham). It also takes a leaf out of the West End musical Wicked, in its very 21st century determination to expose the ambiguity within those characters type cast as villains: the wicked fairy of Disney lore is here recast as a clumsy, punky, insecure misfit (Lisa Lambe, simply terrific) with hair like an exploding pillow case, who in a fit of pique curses the new born princess in the part of the story known to millions, and spends the ensuing years trying desperately to fix her mistake.

Norris's production seems equally determined at all costs to entertain: the set pieces usher forth with relentless regularity and the energy levels never flag, at least on stage: I confess I felt mine at times starting to dip. But if the story at times feels like a grab bag of colourful strands rather than a fully worked through idea (although I particularly liked the detail of newborn Beauty's mother as a raddled, sleep deprived narcissist), Norris and his designer Katrina Lindsay have created a wondrous fairy land on the Olivier stage that captivates the attention even when the action starts to wander.

Spindles atop wobbly legs lace the stage while branches hang in the air like surreal dreams, like the Forest of Arden as designed by Salvador Dali. Three superior fairies who dislike getting their hands dirty in human affairs occasionally descend from the heavens, their dresses shimmering like water. There is a terrific pack of thuggish "thorns", who gleefully put to sleep the troupe of princely duffers who try to get near to Sleeping Beauty, and who resemble the pack of cards in Alice in Wonderland. Etiolated servants belonging to Queenie writhe around the stage like souls in purgatory. There is an all-knowing old man who sits at spinning wheel like a character straight out of Brothers Grimm.

Amid all this, the emotional heart of the story can at times feels crowded out, with the outstanding exception of Queenie (Victoria Hamilton-Barritt) who nods, surely deliberately, to the Witch in Sondheim's Into the Woods: a deeply complicated, misunderstood and desperately lonely mother. In a jaunty score by Jim Fortune that sometimes feels as though it's had everything but the kitchen sink thrown at it, she has the evening's most haunting refrain, and Hamilton-Barritt, magnificent, squeezes from it every last drop she can.

Hex has rather too much light and not enough shade – even the most brilliantly gruesome scene, featuring Queenie gobbling up her grandchildren, is tempered by our knowledge that in fact, she has been tricked into eating a goat and a bear.

Yet it's also often glorious, even if it reminds us perhaps once too many times that its better to be yourself rather than a hero or a villain in a fairy tale.

Until Jan 14. Tickets: 020 7452 3000; nationaltheatre.org.uk