Pinocchio pulls all the wrong strings
SOMEONE at the Royal National Theatre has an odd idea of what children like to watch. Its Christmas production of Pinocchio, which claims to be suitable for ‘brave eight-year-olds and above’, is a gloomily lit grind with a confusing storyline, slow start, middling special effects and menacing giant puppets.
It all ends with the message that pain is good for you. Happy Christmas, kiddywinks!
This two-and-a-half hour show, written by Dennis Kelly, includes songs from the 1940 Walt Disney cartoon of Pinocchio. They include When You Wish Upon A Star, Hi-Diddle-DeeDee and I’ve Got No Strings. But surprisingly little is made of the music and the first song takes an age to appear.
It is almost as if the producers are embarrassed to be associated with anything as sugary and (brilliantly) commercial as the Disney film.
Carpenter Geppetto craves a child. He is visited by the Blue Fairy and she gives him magic wood from which he carves a boy puppet. Pinocchio emerges quite cleverly from the tree trunk in Geppetto’s workshop.
Geppetto himself is represented, weirdly, by a giant puppet. Mark Hadfield has to walk underneath this enormous, fixed head, helping to operate it as he delivers the lines. Thus is one of our best comic actors wasted.
Mr Hadfield can normally raise a laugh simply by walking on to a stage, but here he is almost invisible. The same unwieldy giantpuppet device is employed to give us the characters of showman Stromboli and his villainous associate Coachman, who abducts children to Pleasure Island and turns them into donkeys.
For a baddie you surely need facial expressions and darty-eyed nastiness. Instead, we just have this vast puppet head floating over the action with an unchanging expression. Hopeless. The show is directed by John Tiffany and designed by Bob Crowley. Did they forget they were meant to be entertaining under-tens? The few children near me on Wednesday night seemed rigid with boredom. There was no excited squeaking at the interval. Joe Idris-Roberts’s bland Pinocchio is accompanied by his conscience Jiminy Cricket (left), who is here a female metropolitan with allergies and an obsession about cleanliness. She, voiced by Audrey Brisson, is also a puppet, though not an oversized one. The nose-stretching when Pinocchio tells lies is, like other tricks, conducted in a half-light. A bit of a cheat, really. The most successful illusion comes with the sea scene, when Geppetto is found in the belly of a whale. Its innards echo like the car deck of a crossChannel ferry.
With the opening-night audience for the large part under-gripped, a few, desperate laughs were raised in a discordant Pleasure Island scene by a Scottish girl shouting her way through repeated lavatorial jokes. By the time she said ‘fart’ for the fourth or fifth time it was starting to lose its comic power.
What a disappointing show. Actually, I thought it was horrid. Aggressively child-unfriendly.