What a week to be reviewing a festive show about a creepy, powerful older man attempting to manipulate a young woman into bed.
The general vibe with Christmas theatre reviews is this: keep it light. But with Russell Brand freshly dispatched to Wandsworth and David Walliams also in the headlines about his alleged sexual behaviour, watching Herod lie, wheedle and disguise himself in a bid to have his way with Mary as part of this distinctly untraditional retelling of the birth of Christ just didn’t feel very funny.
Indeed, the best line of the night at Liverpool’s Royal Court when Northern Soul saw The Scouse Nativity came not from the stage but from the stalls. As Herod stalked off following some pantomime villain chat with the audience about eventually seducing Mary, one punter shouted “Fuck off, Russell”. None of this was the fault of Paul Duckworth, a stalwart of the Royal Court’s annual Scouse pantos and Liverpool theatre in general. He played Herod – described by trainee angel Angela Gabriel (Lindzi Germain) as a “pound-shop Jafar” – with all the camp gnarling that the character was intended to ooze.
The Scouse Nativity. Credit: AB Photography.
Maybe a storyline like his pursuit of Mary should never be funny, maybe booing at the Herods of this world is exactly the way to go. But just then, to me, it didn’t feel like a laughing matter. Aside from the challenge of this inadvertent and likely unwanted topicality, The Scouse Nativity is pretty much exactly what you would expect from the Royal Court’s mammoth festive run, and most of the audience enjoying early an Christmas night out seemed content that they’d got what they came for: plenty of swearing, jokes about St Helens being crap, and a series of jolly pop covers chosen because of their tenuous lyrical relevance to the plot.
The best of these was Baby One More Time, performed by the boyishly energetic Adam McCoy (Joseph), having apparently acquired Britney Spears’ trademark nasal tone by partaking of Mary’s gas and air as she gave birth in the stable. Meanwhile, it felt like much of the second act was contrived to facilitate Raye’s Where the Hell is my Husband?, although this cannot actually be true because The Scouse Nativity was first performed here with a different sound track nine years ago.
Jess Smith (Mary) has the range to have a credible pop at Raye’s challenging vocals, but as it seems likely that every 2026 Christmas show in the country will feature this panto-baiting banger, few marks for originality can be awarded here. More distinctive was Mark Walters’ revolving story book set, which was charming enough that, at times, it seemed a shame that this production is not one for children. But, at other times, there was Herod. Fuck off, Herod.
Main image: The Scouse Nativity. Credit AB Photography.
The Scouse Nativity is at Liverpool’s Royal Court until January 16, 2027. For more information, click here.
