Red-hot performances Impressed by Pimpernel

AHOMAGE to James Cameron’s Titanic, a baguette for a shin splint and a royal ball guest in T-shirt and Bermuda shorts… it doesn’t immediately sound like The Scarlet Pimpernel, and with good reason.

Jenny Wren Productions’ whacky, Goon Show-ish adaptation of Baroness Orczy’s tale of fearlessness, Frenchmen and foppery, held at the Tuckwell Amphitheatre, was a flagrant case of Liberté! Égalité! and an awful lot of Frivolité!, with many of the original novel’s significant moments straying dangerously close to pure pantomime, as legions of historical drama stereotypes were mercilessly lampooned.

It is 1792, the height of the Reign of Terror, and wealthy French aristocrats are being summarily sent to the guillotine. But help is at hand. Led by the courageous English baronet Sir Percy Blakeney, the League of The Scarlet Pimpernel is only a Channel-hop away, and they have a cunning plan or two to whisk the doomed aristos out from under revolutionary France’s very nose.

Director Jenny Wicks and her versatile,

six-strong cast have pulled off a little miracle here. Surrounded by backwoods, bar rooms and barrels, they told the whole story with breathless panache and topped it off with a smattering of jolly songs, occasionally while prancing around on hobby horses, and, yes, they were using coconuts.

There was the now-statutory plundering of the audience’s picnic hampers, a recent tradition at open-air productions, and even the Prince of Wales showed up to enjoy it all.

Relishing his role as the villain, the remarkably gifted Greg Aston anchored the entire production.

Late on, the entire front row was pressed into service, playing pass the parcel with a model of Sir Percy’s yacht Daydream. Add to that the direct narrative style, and, like the infamous Bastille itself, the fourth wall was not so much broken as totally demolished. One minor gripe – some of the dialogue barely made it to the back tier, with fragments of it lost altogether in the warm night air.

Mais pas de problème. The whole was still greater than the sum of its parts, so vive le Scarlet Pimpernel!

For details of the 2019 summer tour, visit jennywrenproductions.co.uk.

The fourth wall was not so much broken as totally demolished