Simon Collins reviews Cinderella, an alternative pantomime, at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith...
OUR VERDICT
If you don’t want your kids propagandized by a traditional panto in which large men appropriate women’s clothing and Prince Charming is really an attractive actress with very nice legs.
The sort of story where equality is for cloud cuckoos, and the central character is a worm-level wretch who must wait for a patriarch to redeem her – then instead take your darlings to the Lyric, Hammersmith, for a right-on panto that is WAF: Woke as F…. Woke enough to be self-ironic: one of the characters castigates the rest as a “bleeding-heart bunch of woke weirdos.”
The story is an exuberant high-energy mash-up of the Cinderella folk tale and traditional English panto elements.
Cinderella herself (Timmika Ramsay) is no modest wallflower but big, proud and brainy - an astronomer to boot.
The setting is urban, some peculiar version of London but above and surrounding the stage is a galaxy of stars, many arranged in the patterns of the constellations.
Yet despite her strong character Cinderella is put upon by a tyrannous stepmother, Madame Meanie (Shobna Gulati), and two awfully ugly sisters.
Luckily, they are as likely to throw jugs of gloop over each other by mistake as onto their detested sister trying on her gown for the ball. Later we will find they don’t really want to be nasty.
Cinderella has a friend, the mischievous Buttons (Jodie Jacobs), and an over the top fairy godmother, Fredbare (Rhys Taylor), who get through every possible double-entendre about balls.
The best twist is that Bob the Prince coincidentally (or was it written in the stars?) is also a keen astronomer, but almost blind without his spectacles.
When fatefully they break he can fall in love with Cinderella for her mind and warm personality undistracted by her enjoyable curves and without realising that both of them are BAME.
The monarchy is mocked but Gabriel Fleary’s delightful satire of real-life princes makes him the most charming character on stage.
The rest of that romance is history or destiny or a fairy tale.
But there is another cherry on the cake: meanwhile, a second romance has blossomed, a chic LGBTQ+ engagement between a woman who sports a dandy row of buttons and a morally reformed sister, the once ugly Popsy (Lauren Samuels).
A double wedding beckons and the audience roars their approval.
It’s time for yet more singing and dancing led by the Lyric Ensemble, a half-dozen apprentice thesps in colourful garb. Somehow they manage to get the audience up and dancing, clapping and singing, and attempting Mexican waves. - Delicious ice cream at the interval too.
What to make of this alternative pantomime?
Is it only political correctness gone nuts? Will the virtues it promulgates seem as absurd to our great-grandchildren as the moral norms of our great-grandparents seem to us?
Certainly, there is not a wholesale rejection of tradition here – the ideal of romance and marriage for instance.
Writer and director Jude Christian and Tinuke Craig are contributing to the Lyric’s tradition of offering an alternative panto.
In a multicultural multi-traditional mixed-up society such as Hammersmith is, and much of urban Britain, it must be appropriate to find a corresponding diversity in the drama.
And there is something reassuring in the recognition that folk tales and forms of art such as pantomime are almost infinitely adaptable vehicles to carry our beliefs.
The entire show from start to end is loud, colourful, musical, funny, foolish, outlandish.
Given that the auditorium is relatively intimate, 550 seats steeply raked, and that so many of the audience are families with children unrestrained in their emotional appreciation you would have a heart of stone to leave unaffected by the merriment of the Christmas spirit.
The Lyric Theatre, Lyric Square, Kings Street, London W6 0QL
Tickets: 020 8741 6850 www.lyric.co.uk
Dates: Saturday 16th November 2019 to Sunday 5th January 2020
Lyric Hammersmith
Lyric Square, King Street, City of London, W6 0QL
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