For those who associate pantos with fun for all the family and jam-packed theatres, Cinderella at the Turbine will feel like a stretch. It’s not for kids – it falls into that dreaded category, adult panto – and its masked audience are further insulated from one another by Perspex screens. Is it possible, in such circumstances, to enjoy oneself? Reader, it is. Lizzy Connolly’s production is proof against the unpropitious circumstances, whipping through this glass slipper (well, crystal Ugg boot) tale with good bad jokes, tight performances and lashes of self-irony.
Scripted by Jodie Prenger and Neil Hurst, this Christmas confection doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not. It’s Cinderella with rude jokes, shorn of characters (due to Boris’s rule of six) and – like the Prince’s ball, which is subject to Covid curfew – over almost before it’s begun. The storytelling is efficient bordering on clinical. Give or take a “look behind you” detour mocking the Cats movie, there’s little of the padding that can make family pantos feel like overstuffed stockings.
It features strong work from Rufus Hound as Buttons, who demands a “Fuck the Tories!” from the crowd at his every entrance. (In this well-heeled corner of Wandsworth, he does well to get one.) As Cinders’ sisters, Oscar Conlon-Morrey and Scott Paige make an emphatically obnoxious twosome, mocking one another’s (and everyone else’s) shape, looks and promiscuity with what feels, in this day and age, like startling impropriety. “Having sex with you,” to offer one among many examples, “is like doing push-ups over a manhole.”
It could all get pretty tawdry, if these weren’t high-end performers, delivering the relentless single and double entendres with skills honed on Shaftesbury Avenue, a queer cabaret edge – and a cheerful sense of the ridiculousness of the enterprise. There’s topical tomfoolery alongside the old school sleaze, too, as Hound circles the stage with a two-metre stick, measuring out a safe distance between Daisy Wood-Davis’s Cinders and her royal squeeze.
The magic of Christmas is in short supply, but there’s throwaway fun to be had here in a show that radiates delight at being back in a theatre – Perspex screens notwithstanding.
At Turbine theatre, London, until 23 December.
