This ‘Cinders’ is heavy on virtue-signalling, light on good old-fashioned fun
Cinderella Lyric Hammersmith, London W6 ★★★★★
You know you’re in 2019 when you’re watching a pantomime in which Cinderella (Timmika Ramsay) is a plus-size black woman with a talent for astrophysics; her reluctant prince (Gabriel Fleary) is one of several characters who seem to be suffering from anxiety; and there’s a sweet little romantic sub-plot involving Jodie Jacobs’s hearty, pinny-sporting Buttons and Lauren Samuels’s nervily insecure stepsister, Popsy.
This is all well and good – and I enjoyed Ramsay’s genial, can-do Cinders, who invents weight-bearing drones in her bedroom while her stepsisters are posing on Instagram, even if she seems weirdly unfussed to be spending her days sanding the verrucae of her leopard skin-clad stepmother in the latter’s Towie-esque suburban semi. The problem is that this Lyric Hammersmith production (the first under new artistic director Rachel O’riordan), directed by Tinuke Craig and written by Jude Christian, is so busy virtuesignalling it forgets that panto also needs to be giddily funny and subversive.
Get the basics wrong, and it doesn’t matter how wellintentioned you are, your panto will collapse like a soufflé. So the staple slapstick scene – a marker of how seriously any pantomime takes the job of being silly – is here an insipid, inept little skit involving a few jugs of flying fruit juice. Mairi Barclay is a great sport as the narcissistic, yobbish Topsy, but Cinderella’s stepmother, Madame Meanie (Shobna Gulati), a C-list Wag-style horror, is meant to be the baddy and, although she stomps about with a pet alligator in tow, she isn’t really very bad at all, meaning there’s precious little properly at stake (even a panto – nay, particularly a panto – needs the fundamentals of storytelling firmly in place). Rhys Taylor’s dame, Fairy Fredbare, is fey, rather than camp, and lacking in serious oomph and charisma, not to mention a decent outsized wardrobe.
Perhaps fittingly for a show shaped by austerity politics and antimonarchical feeling (Cinderella and her prince willingly decide to redistribute their wealth), everything feels a bit, well, cheap. The sets are drab; the hip-hop dance routines – featuring an energetic community ensemble – unspectacular. Christian’s script has plenty of zippy one-liners (including what will, no doubt, become this year’s obligatory panto reference to Pizza Express in Woking), but if it’s blissful entertainment you seek, you’ve come to the wrong place.