After a year of squeezing it into morning slots, allowing it to filter into gently whimsical studio shows and permitting its presence in the marketable form of interval ice creams, pantomime is theatre land’s way of addressing childhood and childishness head on. Instead of those odd, solemn infants occasionally brought to matinees of Hedda Gabler, we have adults enjoying themselves at one remove, ghosts at the feast of anarchic, chocolate-coin scattering glee. This production firmly readdresses the seasonal balance towards adulthood, injecting rigourous seriousness and weight into the potential flimsy matter of the Cinderella story; a compromise between generations that may well leave neither fully contented.
Tragedy decays the leaves of every fairy tale; Snow White is orphaned and narrowly escapes murder, Belle is poor and imprisoned, and the Little Mermaid swims in an ocean of briny tears. Rachel Kavanaugh’s production takes the bold approach of confronting the events of its heroine’s troubled adolescence head on.
Cinderella, played with sulky charm by Faye Castelow, is recast as a clockmaker’s daughter, distraught after her mother’s death; visited by a white bird that offers some comfort, she confines herself to house and garden to grieve. The arrival of a new stepmother and stepsisters only amplifies her misery; interestingly, she plays some part in her own exile below stairs by a combination of aggressive truculence and a tendency to bite. The ‘ugly’ sisters are mad, screeching spinning tops of misguided glee, while the King (the impeccably doughty Timothy Kightley) completes the catalogue of eighteenth century psychological malaise by refusing to leave his bed, crowding the orchestra and risking turning the evening into a bedroom farce of the seldom encountered child-friendly variety.
The production is, Ugly Sisters aside, fastidiously accurate to its chosen setting, with beautiful, bright breeches, frockcoats and powdered wigs straight out of a child’s book of costume. Ruari Murchison’s gorgeous design lulls us through the unfamiliar and discordant plot elements with the presence of an immense clock and sweeping staircase, offering reassurance that the ending at least is safe. Attempts at visual wizardry, though, often fall flat, while the small cast similarly swaps magic for mean-seeming ingenuity, particularly notable in the ball, which is spectacular only in its inability to draw, not only the promised princesses, but any attendees beyond the clockmaker’s menage.
In keeping with the production’s middle-brow aesthetic, Mozart is injected into the narrative, but William Postlethwaite’s approach is less Amadeus, more Blackadder‘s Prince George, bobbing about haplessly and infuriatingly, as though under painful consciousness of his own superfluity to the plot. ‘Wolfie’ is an excuse for the airing of Magic Flute melodies, rendered in unmellifluous, tinnily piped harpsichord – the constant airing of the ‘Queen of the Night’ aria about as likely to inspire similar flights of prodigious genius in children as Baby Mozart CDs.
There is a kind of grim satisfaction in watching the twisting machinations of Charles Way’s clockwork plot at work – clever reversals of the shoe-fitting plot and toe-cutting horror do something to speed the slowly passing minutes. Where in defter hands the story could be an energetic farce, though, this weighty proposition unglues the slapstick, puts buffoonery to bed and sends us home with nothing behind us except a vaguely unsatisfied inner – or outer – child.
