THE PRINCESS AND THE PEA.
Young People/Tour
THE PRINCESS AND THE PEA
devised by the Company
Tutti Frutti theatre company tour to 6 March then May/June
Runs 50min
Review Timothy Ramsden 15 February at Playhouse, MacRobert Centre Stirling
A light-texted, physically inventive joyride of a production for 3+.Of all traditional tales, this seems to me the silliest, one designed to give mystic reality to a near-supernatural concept of 'Royalty'. Though, given the benefit of the democratic doubt, it might be claimed as a paradigm of the idea that commitment - in love or anything else - carries people beyond their normal strength and power.
It's doubtful many people aged 3 or a bit more will be thinking of this as they enjoy this new Princess and the Pea. But the power of good young people's theatre is that it hits matters which are felt, or instinctual, for the young. Devised rather than rehearsed, Tutti Frutti's colourful show scores as action and comic invention. Reasonably enough, it leaves the words to fill in only where necessary to keep the action going.
Brian (that's cutting the princely down to size) is the young royal used to playing happily with his friend Zolta. Her dress identifies her as peasant or (given her proximity to the royal boy) palace servant. Then adulthood beckons: Brian's mother dispatches him to find a bride.
As his journey becomes, with impressive physicality, more demanding, the potential Princess Brians he meets (incarnated with quick variety by Belinda Lazenby and a flexible use of a single costume) turn out equally ludicrous.
Brian ploughs through a quagmire, or finds himself flying on a magic carpet with engine trouble. At the ends of his travelling, he meets a royal martial arts expert, a princess prepared to chat him to death, a serial flatulence sufferer and others as comically ludicrous.
So it's back home to Zolta, who passes herself off as a princess, overcoming Queenly suspicions by spending an allegedly sleepless night atop a pile of pea-concealing mattresses.
It's not, of course, royalty that does it but below-stairs cunning. Zolta's overheard the Queen's plans and deploys a whole tin of supermarket finest, purloined from the royal kitchens by means of a furtive nocturnal expedition and stuffed under the top mattress, to keep herself lumpily awake.
Sometimes, it seems, you have to make your own luck to secure a happy ending. It's not the delights of deception but the urge to do what experience has told you is right - Zolta's prepared to run severe security dangers to obtain her tin of peas - that comes out of this highly enjoyable show. And, of course, this needs doing when authority won't listen to your reasons: it's democratic after all.
Brian/Queen: Stewart Thomas
Zolta/Princesses: Belinda Lazenby
Director: Niladri
Designer/Costume: Jim O' Reilly
Music: Dominic Sales
2003-02-22 11:36:25