Theatre reviews: The Pantomime Adventures of Peter Pan | A Christmas Carol | 4Play
The Pantomime Adventures Of Peter Pan, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh ****
A Christmas Carol, Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh ****
4Play, Traverse, Edinburgh ****
It’s Peter Pan, folks, but not as you know it. This year’s fun-packed Edinburgh panto at the Festival Theatre is a Peter Pan sequel, which hangs on to the essential Peter Pan characters – Peter Pan and Wendy, Pan’s fairy Tink, and, to everyone’s surprise, Captain Hook, who emerges unscathed from the belly of the crocodile – but dispenses with large chunks of the familiar narrative.
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Hide AdInstead, in a script by Harry Michaels and Edinburgh star Allan Stewart, The Pantomime Adventures Of Peter Pan offers a new threat to Neverland in the shape of a shortage of fairy dust, and a drying-up of the magic waterfall that produces it; and with Pan unable to fly, the quest begins to restore Neverland’s precious magic.
The story, as it turns out, makes very little sense at all; since it finally seems that we could have restored Pan’s power of flight all along simply by believing in it, in best JM Barrie style. Holes in the narrative hardly matter, though, as the panto’s inimitable trio of stars – Jordan Young as hapless cabin boy Smee, a riotous Allan Stewart as his mammy May McSmee, and an ever more impressively hilarious Grant Stott as Captain Hook – romp their way through one nonsensical scene after another, in a show stuffed to the brim with cheeky Edinburgh humour and local references.
This is not a panto that ticks all the traditional boxes; and the characters of Peter Pan and Wendy are so underwritten that they seem almost surplus to requirements. Where the show does embrace traditional panto tricks though – some fabulous tongue-twisters in particular – its skill and timing is a joy to behold, as are the six fabulous dancer-acrobats known as Flawless, who form Hook’s pirate crew; and Andy Pickering’s six-piece orchestra, in the pit, keep the whole show moving, with a powerhouse musical performance that sends the audience home beaming from ear to ear, and feeling that the Christmas season of daftness and fun has truly arrived in town.
There’s another tremendous piece of classic Christmas entertainment on view at the Roxy this week, where Fringe star Guy Masterson – producer, performer and director extraordinary – is delivering his gorgeous two-hour solo version of A Christmas Carol, perhaps the greatest Christmas story of all. Adapted by Nick Hennegan, and loosely based on Dickens’s own live performance script, this Christmas Carol involves just two props – a simple chair, and a coat hanging from a hook – and a soundtrack, by Robb Williams, that slightly disconcertingly sets the story around the time of the Second World War. At its centre, though, stands Masterson’s performance as Scrooge and all the other characters, leading us unerringly, and with tremendous political and psychological insight, through this magical tale of meanness and money-lust defeated; and replaced, at last, by all the love and generosity of a truly glorious Christmas morning.
And at the Traverse Theatre, meanwhile, shoestring Edinburgh company 4Play offer a tantalisingly impressive evening of four short plays, ranging from Mikey Burnett’s chilling two-hander Colours Run, an almost Pinteresque drama about two Edinburgh brothers with a strange and menacing relationship, to Andrea Mackenzie’s Being Normal, a 30-minute musical (with excellent songs by Malcolm MacFarlane) in which a depressed new mother, her people-phobic neighbour, and a fairy godmother with a malfunctioning wand, somehow forge a 21st century St Andrews Night family. Billed as plays about Edinburgh from Edinburgh, all four short pieces gleam with talent, and are brilliantly delivered by a ten-strong acting company; and if this is what 4Play can achieve with no funding at all, it’s thrilling to think what they might produce, given the support they clearly deserve.
The Pantomime Adventures of Peter Pan runs until 31 December. A Christmas Carol and 4Play both run until 1 December.