When a panto’s biggest laughs are canned, it is not a great sign. Marking the centenary of the end of the first world war and the ongoing struggles of the suffragette movement, the Belgrade’s alternative panto is an hour of puns that predate the battles they’re based on. The all-female cast of four (Laura Tipper, Aimee Powell, Kimisha Lewis and Miriam Grace Edwards) do what they can to haul energy on to the stage, but once the dust from the bombs and boom-tishes fades, there’s little left to salvage.
We start in Coventry’s music hall in 1917 and end on the front line in France. Four soldiers are sent on a secret mission to rescue the Actresses Franchise League, a troupe providing light relief to troops in France. Both structure and plot are baffling, but by hook or by crook, they make it to the front line.
Along the way, they bump into a cast of caricatures with fake moustaches and bad accents aplenty. Four of the fleeting strangers are based on real women who risked their lives during the war; munitions worker Lottie Meade, nurse Edith Cavell, actor Lena Ashwell and singer Gertrude Bell. The cast reveal this at the end of the show in a sombre moment of remembrance, but in the performance the women are extras. We spend all but five minutes with the four hapless soldiers who laugh louder at their own jokes than we do. By replacing the suffragettes’ triumphs with these dull buffoons, Nick Walker’s script trips over itself and unintentionally erases the stories of the very women it wants to shout about.
Over the Top does away with traditional panto jollies and leaves large gaps for attempts at humour to sag through. The spare physical comedy is sluggish (not helped by sound levels so distressingly low that we have to strain to hear), the characters interchangeable and Katy Stephens’ direction indistinct. The show is built on good intentions, but it is extremely underwhelming for a promise of an extravagant evening. At the end of a year of a multitude of shows with such sharp gender-based humour, it is especially deflating.
At the Belgrade, Coventry, until 29 December.
