Pantomime reviews: Robinson Crusoe and the Caribbean Pirates | The Costorphine Road Nativity | Zorro

Published on Wednesday 9 December 2009 19:56

ROBINSON CRUSOE AND THE CARIBBEAN PIRATES **** KING'S THEATRE, EDINBURGH THE CORSTORPHINE ROAD NATIVITY *** FESTIVAL THEATRE, EDINBURGH ZORRO *** TRAVERSE THEATRE, EDINBURGH

IT ALWAYS seems to me that the best Christmas shows bear some kind of resemblance to a plum pudding. Their texture is rich, their size is flexible, and they contain a huge rag-bag of mixed ingredients, from stodgy suet to exotic spices. But they are fundamentally warm and cheering, the kind of festive dishes around which princes and people alike can gather, once a year, to remind themselves of those basic human sorrows and joys they hold in common.

The trouble, though, is that the traditional festive pud never seems quite smart, slick, or fashionable enough for the seasonal theatre-makers of Edinburgh. This year's pantomime at the King's, Edinburgh, for example – a souped-up version of the Robinson Crusoe story, produced by Scarborough-based panto giants Qdos, and co-written by the King's regular panto director Paul Elliott with star Allan Stewart – is probably the jolliest professional Christmas show on offer within the city limits; and it has plenty of impressive qualities.

It belts in fine style through the story of young Robinson, his mammy Mrs Crusoe (Stewart, in particularly gorgeous and genial form), and their journey from Edinburgh to the South Seas in search of the treasure marked on a map which happens to be tattooed on young Robinson's bottom. It features some excellent singing and dancing, an all-star debut from the lovely Moyo Omoniyi as Girl Friday, and cheerful sense of humour about its own storyline. And it also benefits from an increasingly persuasive stage partnership among what's emerging as the new core cast of the Edinburgh panto – Stewart himself as the Dame, Grant Stott as the villain Blackheart, and lovely Jo Freer as the villain's exasperated but loving better half, a central-belt socialite turned mermaid.

The show, though, pursues the goal of slickness and pace almost to the exclusion of the jolly spirit of anarchy that makes the panto world go round. It has plenty of panto features and local references – not least the Dame's ceremonial first entrance in a mock-up of an Edinburgh tram. But some of the key panto sequences and riffs are only allowed to run for a couple of seconds; whereas time has to be made for embarrassing fundraisers like this year massive Qdos product placement for Churchill the insurance dog. Still, the cheery ebullience and sheer professionalism of Stewart and his team are hard to resist; and this brisk show sends its audience home grinning, and somehow empowered to face the Christmas rush.

The Corstorphine Road Nativity, at the Festival Theatre, is a different kind of Christmas show altogether, an ambitious effort by Festival City Theatres to create a specially-crafted Christmas drama out of Tim Firth's successful 1999 play the Flint Street Nativity, originally set in the north of England. The central device of Firth's play is that an adult cast play a group of ten seven-year-olds involved in putting on their primary school's annual nativity play; its message is that the children's emotional lives precisely mirror the stresses and strains of the adult world around them, and that innocence, sweetness and light often have very little to do with it. Joanna Read's production, at the Festival Theatre, certainly has a magnificent Edinburgh-centred cast, featuring leading Scottish stage and screen actors Jimmy Chisholm, Ryan Fletcher, and Colin McCredie of Taggart, as well as the wonderful Sara Crowe as the bad-tempered class glamour-girl. But somehow, Read's production – with its embarrassing moments of mock-melodrama, sudden fades to black, and occasional almost Beckettian vagueness about what's going on – struggles to find a convincing, fluent style. The first night audience laughed a lot, and seemed to enjoy the show. But the Edinburgh idiom of the revised text never quite overcomes the sense that this play belongs to smaller towns in narrower valleys, where pubs and sheep-farms exist cheek by jowl; and the production looks so uneasy, on the big stage of the Festival Theatre, that the sheer excellence of the acting never quite makes the emotional impact it should.

As for the Traverse/Visible Fictions co-production of Zorro, this is the kind of children's show that will pick up extravagant praise wherever it goes, simply for its success in telling the tale of Zorro – the famous masked champion of the poor and oppressed in the Spanish colony of 19th century California – using a cast of only three, and a bare wooden ramp of a basic set.

The difficulty is, though, that if you look beneath this show's surface pace and increasingly tiresome narrative ingenuity, it suffers from two serious problems. First, the impact of Zorro's nightly transformation from fatherless stable-boy to avenging warrior is inevitably diminished in a situation where all three actors are constantly transforming themselves from one character to another; is Diego the boy turning into Zorro, or is actor Sandy Grierson just changing characters?

And secondly, the politics of the piece is distinctly un-Christmassy. The story depicts a spat among members of the colonial boss-class about whether one should be nice or beastly to the peasantry; yet the show's combination of unthinking adventure-story and increasingly jokey design reduces that peasantry to a set of tiny comic puppets in the hands of the "real characters", with the kids in the audience laughing their heads off while these low-life caricatures are robbed, patronised, beaten and even tortured.

To say this is unfortunate is an understatement; and it suggests a lack of joined-up thinking about the overall intention of the show that reduces this Zorro to a thin if enjoyable action adventure built on the flimsiest of moral foundations, rather than on the rich, rebellious popular energy of the Christmas theatre tradition at its best.

&149 Robinson Crusoe is at the King's Theatre until 17 January. The Corstorphine Road Nativity is at the Festival Theatre until 19 December. Zorro is at the Traverse Theatre until 24 December; all Edinburgh.

CRITIC'S CHOICE

A Christmas Carol

Oran Mor, Glasgow, until 19 December

IF YOU'RE in Glasgow over the next week, don't miss the sharpest and funniest of all this year's Christmas shows for grown-ups. In the best Wildcat tradition, Oran Mor's one-hour lunchtime version of the Dickens classic combines razor-sharp satire against the banking classes with lots of rollicking panto fun, led by a sparkling Andy Gray as the Dame, Mrs Cratchit.

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