A fairytale ending? Not with watery warbling and Prince Digby the dud
The Light Princess (Royal National Theatre) Verdict: Doesn’t float
LORD knows what sort of mushrooms they were serving in the Royal National Theatre canteen when artistic director Sir Nicholas Hytner agreed to stage this peculiar musical by Tori Amos.
Not since the dying days of British Leyland and its Austin marque has the word ‘Princess’ been applied to quite such a ropey vehicle.
Based on a fairy tale, it features Princess Althea of Lagobel, a dippy creature so ‘up’ that her feet literally never touch the ground.
The notable technical achievement of this show is the way Rosalie Craig, who gallantly plays Althea, is kept aloft by muscle men and wires. She manages to perform even with puppeteer-type blokes grabbing hold of her inner thighs and holding her upside down.
Over in Lagobel’s rival kingdom of Sealand, meanwhile, smoulders Prince Digby (Digby!), who is never happy. Nick Hendrix plays the role with conviction. If you’d been cast in such a stinker of a part, you might be glum, too.
Digby is sent to shoot Althea. Missing his target — pity, one inch to the right and we’d have been home long before the interval — he falls in love with her. They end up naked in a lake, surrounded by lily pads and cutesy frogs and some sort of phallic sea anemone which had weaker-minded members of the National audience going ‘ah’.
Cue lots of singing without one memorable tune. Digby’s dad, wicked King Ignacio (a cousin of Rowan Atkinson?) orders the lake to be drained. Althea seems bound to die of thirst but again lives to warble another day. Foiled again!
Director Marianne Elliott has certainly come up with a fairy book staging. A small fortune has been thrown at the sets and Ruritanian costumes. Rather less may have been spent on singing lessons for Clive Rowe, who limps and honks through the part of Althea’s father, once-kind King Darius.
A musical surely needs persuasive sentiment. This one just feels silly, the characters a weird mix of knowing irony and shallow childishness. The music is sub-Lloyd Webber. And Marina Warner’s essay in the programme deserves to go in Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner.