Room On the Broom

The book, and everything that grew out of it

Room on the Broom was published by Macmillan in 2001, written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Axel Scheffler, the pairing that had produced The Gruffalo two years earlier. The story is built on a simple accumulating mechanism: a witch loses her hat, then her hair bow, then her wand, each is retrieved by an animal that asks for a ride in return, and the overloaded broomstick snaps in two. A dragon turns up hungry, the animals frighten it off, and the witch brews a replacement broom with seats for everyone. It has been translated into 22 languages and has won six book awards, among them the Blue Peter and Mumsnet prizes.

The animated half-hour that most families know came later. Magic Light Pictures produced it, Max Lang and Jan Lachauer directed, Martin Pope and Michael Rose produced, and it was broadcast on BBC One on 25 December 2012. Simon Pegg narrated; Gillian Anderson voiced the witch, Rob Brydon the cat, Martin Clunes the dog, Sally Hawkins the bird, David Walliams the frog and Timothy Spall the dragon. It won the British Academy Children's Award for animation in 2013 and was nominated for best animated short film at the 86th Academy Awards in 2014. A walk-through attraction opened at Chessington World of Adventures in 2019.

The stage version predates all of that. Tall Stories first put the book on a stage in 2008, four years before the animation aired, and has kept it in circulation ever since.

Tall Stories, and how the company works

Tall Stories was founded in 1997 by Olivia Jacobs and Toby Mitchell, who met working on the box office at Soho Theatre. The first shows were made for the Edinburgh Fringe and pitched at general audiences; families were the ones who turned up. The company's direction was set in 2001 by an adaptation of The Gruffalo, staged roughly eighteen months after the book came out, when Donaldson and Scheffler were not yet a household fixture. That production is still running. Speaking to the Islington Faces interview series in March 2026, Mitchell put its total audience at three million children across 18 countries, with 37 different actors having played in it.

Since 2020 the company has worked out of an unused section of Islington Central Library, taken on in partnership with Islington Council, which gives it an 80-seat studio theatre alongside offices. New work is tried out there in front of local school groups before it goes anywhere near a touring circuit, and the company feeds into the borough's 11 by 11 scheme, which aims to get every child in Islington a set of cultural experiences before secondary school.

The house style is consistent enough to be recognisable across the repertoire. Costumes suggest an animal rather than encasing a performer in one, on the principle that a child's imagination fills the rest in. Mitchell has described building in a direct address to the audience roughly every ten to fifteen minutes, and treating technology as a way of telling the story rather than a substitute for telling it.

Room on the Broom as a touring property

The adaptation is written for four performers, with songs by Jon Fiber and Andy Shaw, and runs without an interval. It has never been a West End-only show: it has toured the UK repeatedly and played North America, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai and Poland. In 2013 it was nominated for the Olivier Award for best entertainment and family, in a category won that year by Goodnight Mister Tom at the Phoenix Theatre.

The most recent full outing before the current one opened at Z-arts in Manchester on 22 October 2024, took in 30 venues, played the Lyric Theatre from 22 November 2024 to 5 January 2025, and finished at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry on 26 April 2025. The Lyric booking sits inside a three-year West End residency the company agreed with Nimax Theatres, which is also what put The Gruffalo into the same house from 17 July to 6 September 2026.

The current tour, announced July 2026

The new tour was announced on 28 July 2026 and opens at the Rose Theatre in Kingston upon Thames from 27 October to 1 November. Before Christmas it plays the Mill Arts Centre in Banbury (7–8 November), the Radlett Centre (10–12 November), the New Theatre Royal in Portsmouth (13–15 November) and Paisley Town Hall (20–22 November), then settles at the Lyric Theatre from 27 November 2026 to 3 January 2027.

It goes back out in the new year: Darlington Hippodrome (27–28 January), Theatre Royal Winchester (30 January – 1 February), Lighthouse Poole (5–7 February), Theatr Clwyd in Mold (9–11 February), the Swan in Worcester (13–14 February), Theatre Royal Nottingham (18–21 February), the Coro in Ulverston (24–25 February), the Lawrence Batley in Huddersfield (26–28 February), Birmingham Hippodrome (3–7 March), the Redgrave in Bristol (9–10 March), the Octagon in Bolton (12–14 March), Swansea Grand (16–17 March), Blackheath Halls (20–21 March), the Gulbenkian in Canterbury (22–24 March), Northern Stage in Newcastle (31 March – 4 April) and Royal & Derngate in Northampton (7–10 April 2027).

Olivia Jacobs directs. She stepped down as co-artistic director in May 2021, after 24 years, and became an artistic associate on the understanding that she would keep directing occasional productions; this is one of them. Morgan Large designs, Yvonne Stone designs the puppets, James Whiteside lights, Morag Cross choreographs and Fiber and Shaw's score carries over. Jacobs framed the revival around the book's ending, saying she hoped that within the laughter the show gives a message that no one is left out and that there is always room for kindness. Toby Mitchell, as artistic director, described the tour as an invitation to families across the UK to hop on board the broom again.

Tickets start at £10 on tour and £13 at the Lyric, where morning performances are generally at 10.30am and matinees at 1.30pm. Accessible performances are spread across the run rather than clustered at one venue: relaxed shows at Kingston, Banbury, Worcester, Nottingham and Birmingham, BSL-interpreted performances at Nottingham, Birmingham and Canterbury, and audio description with touch tours at Birmingham and Canterbury.

What happens in the hour

Four actors cover the whole story, splitting the work between playing characters outright and puppeteering them. On the 2024–25 run Amy Harris played the witch, Nadia Shash the cat, Dan Armstrong operated the dog puppet and doubled as the frog, and Joe Lindley played the dragon as a broad Welsh turn. Large's set puts an outsized moon behind a forest of trees with broken broomsticks caught in them. Cross's choreography slows the flying sequences down to something closer to mime, gives the dragon a chorus-line routine, and assembles the animals into the mud-caked monster that sees it off — the moment reviewers tend to single out.

Critical reaction to that run was warm rather than unanimous. BroadwayWorld gave it four stars and picked out the puppetry and the design. Theatre and Tonic, reviewing on 25 November 2024, gave three, praising the dog puppet and the pace but finding the sound design and songs short of magic at the climax, and noting that the show's panto-adjacent energy had tipped some of the younger children into overstimulation by the finale. The same review suggested the sweet spot is nearer five than the advertised three, though the book's regulars manage fine at three. The songs are the element that recurs in audience reaction: each animal gets a number that fills in a back story the book leaves blank, and children tend to leave singing them.