Sleeping Beauty

Pantomime is an undervalued theatrical genre. A successful pantomime needs a good balance between the storytelling, the comedy business and the musical elements in its script. It needs pace, energy and sharp comedy timing in the direction to drive the narrative and keep the audience engaged together with slick scene changes and a running time of around two hours. When these elements are all present it is a brilliant form of entertainment and most of all a wonderful introduction of young people to live theatre.

When a Society decides to write its own script, it allows the writer to add in additional characters to offer more members a named role and gain experience of being on stage and Shinfield Players’ script created twenty-one named roles and presented a fresh take on the story of Sleeping Beauty. We meet the Gypsy Prince and his family before we meet the Rose, a gift from the fairies to the childless King and Queen. The curse is from a thorn on a rose rather than the traditional spinning wheel. A unicorn is added to provide another magical element. The creativity of these ideas is to be admired but the elements did over complicate the story telling and reduced the scope for comedy business and musical elements and unbalanced the production .
 
The main comic business was an elaborate baking scene with a wild puppet rabbit and a very busy ghost bench scene which both showed some inventive ideas but not everything worked and required either sharper execution or a stronger edit of the weaker elements. The musical choices were good but with a band of four stage left many of the voices need better amplification to create a balanced sound mix so that the words could be heard. Despite this the audience reaction showed a real appreciation of the cast’s efforts and a good level of response to the traditional callbacks and I am sure enjoyed the show.

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