At
this time of year, London’s larger suburban theatres offer pantomime at
its most traditional: eye-catching sets, sumptuous costumes, and
celebrity casts bent on making up in energy what they have lacked in
rehearsal time and substantial scripting. The scripts themselves sketch
out the conventional tales, laced with jokes alternately
end-of-the-pier risqué and Christmas-cracker groanworthy.
Both these shows are scripted by Eric Potts who, as I observed last year in my review of his travesty of
Peter Pan,
is not big on subtlety. As one of the more liberal reviewers, I am
unaccustomed to complaining about vulgarity but, well, if my ears did
not deceive me (although thanks to the actor’s poor diction they may
have) and that Ugly Sister in
Cinderella really did make a remark about vajazzling, just imagine yourself as a parent facing your bewildered youngster’s questioning.
Potts also directs Wimbledon’s
Dick Whittington
and plays the dame… which, in a show that also features the pantomime
début of Dame Edna Everage, is pretty damn hubristic. Edna, probably
the world’s most famous and venerable drag comedienne (so to speak),
nominally plays the good fairy who helps Dick vanquish the evil King
Rat and return to London to be elected Lord Mayor. In practice, though,
from her first appearance above our heads as she is flown onto the
stage in a wombat-shaped seat, she simply Ednas, gently but bitchily
taking the mickey out of all around her: audience, fellow performers,
script, the whole business. I suspect this show was of the standard
hour-each-way duration before Edna’s insertions. Barry Humphries, the
man beneath the sequins and the mauve rinse, is now 77 years old, and
Edna too is beginning to slow down, but she remains the most vibrant
element in this show despite the effortful daming of Potts and the
enthusiastic best-mate business of Kev Orkian as Idle Jack.
Gary
Wilmot at Richmond is far more unforced in his chumminess as Buttons,
but he is frankly too old even for panto plausibility: when a greying
Buttons declares that he is in love with a Cinderella young enough to
be his daughter (former EastEnder Kellie Shirley), something feels
dubious. Much of the patter at Richmond, too, feels tailored to a
particularly middle-class audience: surely only here would the
description of Prince Charming’s equerry Dandini as “an ordinary
working man” pass without either a hoot of derision or a gasp of
incredulity. (As against that, Richmond is also home turf for a
“Fenton!” joke.)
And if it seems at
first that much of Wimbledon’s budget has gone on the casting of Dame
Edna, think again. In Act Two, a 3-D undersea animation sequence, in
which we feel as if the fish are in the same room with us, puts on hold
for several minutes the live action involving human beings who actually
are. A fine gimmick, but insane in a live entertainment. Thank heavens
for Dame Edna and her tart flavour of “niceness”.
Written for the Financial
Times.