King Shirley XII has an awful lot of clothes. His dressing room has two double-height rails of them. They stretch from one side of the palace to the other. There are frou-frou skirts, white feather gowns, fur-lined robes, linen jackets and tartan tops. The king doesn’t like any of them. Played by Jeremy Bradfield with a cartoon Italian accent and the petulance of a small child, he could be lost in a backstage wardrobe.
That’s appropriate because everything about Mark Calvert’s Northern Stage production screams theatre. There are the Victorian clamshell footlights on Alison Ashton’s twin-level wooden stage. There is the music-hall bumptiousness of Hannah Goudie-Hunter and Bob Nicholson of children’s company Kitchen Zoo as the itinerant chancers mistaken for tailors.
And there is the preposterous false moustache worn by Simmie Kaur as the king’s first minister, a man bright enough to suspect the newcomers and vain enough to fall for their deceit.
Throw in a mop-like dog, live music by Jeremy Bradfield and, of course, an imaginary suit made of imaginary thread (a “fabric-ation”) and you get a production of the Hans Christian Andersen tale where everything is larger than life. Laura Lindow’s dialogue, devised with company members, is similarly heightened, all fruity malapropisms and oratorical flourishes.
It looks, in other words, like rather a good show to see in the theatre. On film, however, it’s a bit much. With the actors belting out their lines to the back of the auditorium, it feels like we’re eavesdropping on a production aimed at somebody else. Nor does it help that the girl who sees through the deceit is a marginal figure, played by a largely silent puppet, instead of being at this story’s perspicacious heart.
Available online 12-31 December.
