Being a horse, Christopher Bianchi’s Planchet finds it hard to tell men and women apart. The gender confusion isn’t entirely his fault. His owner is wannabe musketeer D’Artagnan, played by sometime drag king Lucy Jane Parkinson, a girl passing herself off as a boy. Hitting Paris with equal parts swagger and vulnerability, she falls in with three musketeers, two of whom surely didn’t grow their own moustaches. And, if you associate femininity with flowing locks, vibrant colours and an eye for fashion, then Delme Thomas’s Louis XIII is your man. What’s a horse to do?
What, more to the point, is D’Artagnan to do? Having impressed the swordsmen with her fighting prowess and having fallen for Nisa Cole’s lady-in-waiting, she can’t hide her true identity for ever. When finally she comes out, in Sarah Punshon’s promenade production written by Hattie Naylor, it’s a melt-in-the-mouth moment of sexual liberation. This is a Three Musketeers for the gender-fluid generation.
All this is delightful – as is Bianchi’s doubling as an evil Cardinal Richelieu, a mirror-image switch from pantomime horse to boo-and-hiss baddie. The plot does, however, have an ethical blind spot. In condemning the cardinal’s lust for power, Naylor must favour the French queen’s lust for the English ambassador. Luckily, she skips ahead before we question whether adultery is something we should be cheering.
For all the jolly wandering about Williamson Park, where the Ashton memorial makes a fine stand-in for a pre-Versailles palace, the production is only fitfully committed to the open-air format. It’s less about what does happen than what doesn’t. Between the main action, the community company members make entertaining market traders, gardeners and sheep, but they are absent for long stretches, as if the show has been conceived in discrete scenes not as a free-flowing whole.
Live music would have papered over the cracks (and made more sense than the playlist of Clash songs), while more street-theatre address and less fourth-wall plotting would have better acknowledged the audience’s presence. But this is of minor consequence on a sunny summer’s evening in a mixed-up world where girls will be boys.
