Cinderella will go to the ball – only first she’s got to help her horrible stepmum with a disgusting vegan dinner. Co-writers Chris Bush and Roni Neale have given Cinders a modern festive twist, complete with a magical microwave and a memorable costume change inside a fridge. As you’d expect from Bush, the script is witty and heartfelt, but it’s also overly complicated, caught somewhere between truthful play and slapdash pantomime.
The Rose is committed to giving young actors a real shot on the main stage and the cast is largely made up of members of the Rose Youth Theatre company, as well as six professional actors. The young performers are, on the whole, very good. A trio of cheese-obsessed mice rap, chatter and charm us all, and Jack Fernie is scene-stoppingly good as a deliciously camp and amazingly convincing cat, Mr Bingles.
The very best adaptations slip on as easily as Cinders’ golden slipper but, despite nifty direction from Owen Horsley and a lovely flamboyant set from Ryan Dawson Laight, this production feels like an awkward fit. Doubts and questions keep arising. Why on earth would stroppy teenage Ella even want to go to a ball, let alone marry a prince? Why are her baby sisters reimagined as fully grown women? What is all this talk of the Prince’s baffling affliction, which means he can’t recognise faces, and are we really supposed to believe sparky young Ella would want to live inside a fantasy world for good?
It’s only when Ella gets back to her real life that Matt Winkworth’s songs – really just skits until this point – start to pack a punch, suddenly laden with feeling and purpose. Kara Lily Hayworth imbues The Witching Hour with frustration, sorrow and longing, as she sings about falling in love with her “impossible” stepdaughter. Maddy Hunter, as Ella, brings to life, quite movingly, just how hard it is to make a blended family work in I Remember. There’s a beautiful play hiding in here – a knockout story about the love between a stepmum and her stepdaughter – that appears in tantalising bursts but gets lost amid the noise and bustle.
• At Rose theatre, Kingston, until 4 January
