Once Upon A Mattress

Perhaps I’ve spent too much time on pantomime, but for me there’s something wrong with Princess Winnifred, the heroine of Once Upon A Mattress.  I mean, the clues are all there.  When she arrives at King Sextimuss’s castle, she swims the moat.  She likes dressing in greens and browns.  She hails  from an area of swampy marshland.  Come on, this is a fairytale: she’s a frog!  But no, the writers had chosen to avoid that particular trope, and we’re left with just an ordinary, hard-drinking, weightlifting, dancing-all-night, superhuman princess.

What the script does do, interestingly and very well, is to cast the hero and heroine, Prince Dauntless and Princess (“not a frog, honest”) Winnifred as comic characters, with the second couple, Lady Larken and Sir Harry as the romantic leads.  This played very well in the WMS production, with Wayne Reddin doing the physical comedy as Dauntless, with the boisterous extrovert Lois Dyer as Winnifred bellowing “I’m Shy” at the top of her considerable voice whilst Victoria Sarker and Callum Searle took the emotional and serious roles of Larken and Harry.

The story is the Hans Christian Andersen tale of The Princess and the Pea which can be told in a couple of sentences, or, in this case, a single opening song from the Minstrel (Chris Wortley) with accompanying mime from the company.  Thereafter, it gets retold, with a lot of padding, as the tale of a mute King (Antony Morrison) and his domineering Queen (Chris Talbot who started as she meant to go on with a wonderful no-time-to-breathe, no-one-else-can-get-a-word-in-edgeways rant).  There’s fun to be had from the mute king, notably a trio with the Minstrel and the morose Jester (David Putley) in which the Minstrel and Jester sing and the King’s implied lyrics are mimed.  In support of the Queen, there’s her Wizard (nicely played by Michael Clarkson in a wig and a stoop).  They try to prevent Dauntless from finding a bride, opposed only by the entire rest of the cast.

As I’ve said before, it’s often hard to tell what a director has done, but here I could spot some neat touches from Christobel Thomas.  The music was at its best when MD Ian Peters added the additional texture of his clarinet to the two keyboards and bass to give a richer sound.  Once again, Victoria Sarker’s choreography was excellent.

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