You’ll love this urban Cinderella
Joy (Theatre Royal Studio, Stratford East) Verdict: Heartwarming romance
HARD-BITTEN hack I may be, but I am, gentle reader, also a soft touch for a sentimental story.
This gritty- sweet, urban Cinderella story, about a girl with Down’s syndrome growing up and leaving home, had me fighting back an insurgent tear.
It may not be the most sophisticated work, and it’s coarsened by downmarket dialogue, but it’s got a whopping great heart in exactly the right place.
Teenager Joy is adored and over-protected by her big sister and their dad (long since abandoned by their mother).
Now she is older, she wants to find love and a social life of her own. She meets a well-meaning lady volunteering at the local library, and then falls in love with a disabled and dreadlocked ‘spoken-word artist’.
Can her sister and dad bear to let her go and get married? I’m not telling.
The story has wishful thinking written all over it, and you could argue it’s sentimental, even patronising. But you could say something similar about most fairy tales and, anyway, you’d be missing the point.
The great thing here is the simplicity and directness of the acting, especially from the disabled actors. It’s something you can neither buy nor teach.
As our heroine, Joy, Imogen Roberts is enchanting. She brings impish stoicism to her character, caught between loyalty to her dad and her desire to fly the nest.
Rachel Bright (Poppy Meadow in EastEnders) plays her big sister with admirable warmth — even if I could have done without her incessant profanities in Stephanie Martin’s often wooden dialogue, designed to make the story seem edgier.
But it’s salutary to see actors with learning disabilities relating their own tales. Deen Hallisey as Joy’s rapping loverboy is affably shy, and their story is nicely offset by the journey of another disabled girl finding sanctuary, in a Victorian-era sub-plot. What a pleasure it is to see such real, unaffected people on stage.