In the latest woke assault on the works of Roald Dahl, a theatre company has sparked outrage by casting girls to play the lead role in Charlie and The Chocolate Factory.
Producers at the Playful Productions theatre company have inserted their modern politics on the children’s classic Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, hiring girl actresses to play the lead role of Charlie Bucket as the stage play tours the UK and Ireland after a run in London’s West End.
According to The Sun newspaper, audiences at a performance in Cardiff, Wales were stunned by the woke alterations to the story of a young boy who goes on a grand adventure after finding a golden ticket.
The paper reported that Playful Productions cast the young actresses Amelia Minto and Jessie-Lou Harvie in the role of Charlie, which they will be sharing with boy alternates Isaac Sudgen and Noah Walton.
One theatregoer who saw the performance in Cardiff was reported by the paper to have been “stunned” that Charlie is “now a girl”.
Another source said: “It just confuses the audience. The story is a classic and has nothing to do with gender so it just seems like change for the sake of being woke.”
“Dahl’s stories and characters were genius. Viewers don’t want or need them to be altered.”
Earlier this year it was revealed that the Penguin Random House Children’s publishing house had made hundreds of alterations to the text of Roald Dahl’s children’s books for new woke editions.
The censorious edits impacted celebrated books such as James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and The Witches.
The changes included characters having their genders unnecessarily switched as well as female characters having their professions changed from possessions such as secretaries to scientists. The publishers justified the alterations on the premise that they felt the need to “protect” children from the supposedly offensive language in the books.
The censorship sparked international backlash, however, following which the publishers attempted to quell public outrage by saying that they would continue to publish the original texts in addition to the new woke versions of Dahl’s works.