Theatre review: Sergeant Cracker’s Christmas Quest - Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline

IT’S a bold panto producer who goes for a brand new show at Christmas time; not a re-working of an old fairytale, but a completely new invention.

Jonathan Stone’s 2011 Christmas show for the Carnegie Hall in Dunfermline takes some inspiration from the Nutcracker story, in that it’s set on Christmas Eve, among the toys waiting around a giant fireside and under a huge Christmas tree, but its story is entirely original.

It features Sergeant Cracker, a friendly old Christmas tree decoration who bosses the others around in the style of a traditional Colonel Blimp; his six jolly red-and-green baubles, played by local children; and nice – if slightly elderly – Flora, the Christmas-tree Fairy, whose position on top of the tree is threatened by a sparkly new Essex-girl fairy in a pink box, and by the Aye Pod, a brutal rap-machine in a Christmas gift box, who doesn’t believe in the spirit of Christmas at all.

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If the idea behind Sergeant Cracker is a good one, though, it’s not impressively worked out in this show, which offers lower production values than many an amateur panto. Stone’s script is less than inspirational, the recorded music is blaring and soulless, and the visual effects barely work. The conclusion, which features a bit of flying, is marred by a mechanism that can’t actually fly high enough to reach the top of the tree, as the story demands.

There’s plenty of goodwill here, and potential for developing this story into a fairytale worth watching; but despite fine work from the team of kids who play the baubles, and plenty of effort from Iain Wotherspoon, Nicola Auld and Lauren Grant as Cracker and the two fairies, the final effect is genial but disappointing, and decidedly down-at-heel.

Rating: **

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