EDINBURGH’S Royal Lyceum is deservedly renowned for its staging of stylish, high-quality family theatre at Christmas time. This year, with writer Morna Young and director Cora Bissett’s retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale The Snow Queen, it has excelled itself.
From the opening moments, in which Edinburgh kids Gerda (the likable and heroic Rosie Graham) and her best pal Kei (Sebastian Lim-Seet on relatable, vulnerable form) are told the ancient stories of how Scotland’s mountains came to be made by boulder-throwing giants, we know that the play (which is set in the Victorian era) is going to be a very Caledonian adventure.
Claire Dargo’s brilliantly chilly (and, as is Scottish Yuletide tradition, posh English) Snow Queen has ensnared the unfortunate Kei and spirited him away to her frozen lair in the Highlands.
What follows is like a road (and rail) movie for the stage. The journey takes us (with Gerda) to Perth (via the then newly built Forth Rail Bridge), through the Cairngorms and, ultimately, into the seas and glens of the far north of Scotland.
As Gerda makes her intrepid way, sworn to rescue her beloved Kei, she makes a variety of colourful friends. One of them, Samuel Pashby’s athletic Corbie, is, unbeknownst to Gerda, the right-hand bird of the Snow Queen.
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However, the others, including Naomi Stirrat’s hilarious and wonderfully ferocious Cairngorms bandit Senga, are true friends. Senga lends Gerda her “horny horse”, aka Hamish the Unicorn.
This fabulous creature (who is pink, preening and prone to double entendres) is played with delightful cheekiness by Richard Conlon. When he isn’t singing his very funny signature song A Horse With a Horn (which is just one of 14 superb songs written for the show by Finn Anderson and Young herself), the frisky unicorn is entertaining us with his decidedly risqué line in humour.
The combination of the tremendous songs and Young’s clever, regularly hilarious writing is a winning one. Gerda’s surreal encounter with a bunch of fantastically costumed flowers is a case in point.
Director Bissett has assembled a universally top rate cast, including Wendy Seager and Antony Strachan, marvellous both as grandparents to Gerda and Kei and as enchanted Highland royalty (and enemies of the Snow Queen). Indeed, one might have said the production is perfect, were it not for Emily James’s ornate, but deeply disappointing, set design.
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Although James’s costumes impress throughout, her choice (sadly, accepted by Bissett) to recreate on-stage a mirror-image replica of the façade of the Lyceum’s grand circle is a disastrous one. If it has a thematic connection to the Andersen story (which begins with the smashing of a mirror) it is a very weak one.
More importantly, as it is built just a few feet above the stage, the set forces actors to crouch down when leaving and entering the stage. A pointless (and, no doubt, expensive) distraction, this ill-conceived piece of scenography is never in tune with what is otherwise an outstanding and wonderfully inventive piece of Christmas theatre.
Until December 31: lyceum.org.uk
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