“Who the f*** comes up with this stuff?”, the man next to us in the stalls wondered audibly, in between guffaws.
We weren’t long into the second half of Scouse Red Riding Hood, the Royal Court’s Christmas 2024 offering and the latest in a line of Liverpool-themed productions as long as the Mersey which have turned this venue into that rarest of things: a commercially-successful producing house.
On stage, our protagonists Red (Lydia Rosa Morales Scully) and – inevitably – Blue (Adam McCoy), were on the moon in a bid to paint it black and thus save Grandma’s cottage from rapacious property developers. It’ll take more words than we have space for here to explain this reworked Riding Hood narrative and, as plot is entirely incidental to this show, let’s not.
Also on stage were ‘The Mingers’, a pair of daft aliens (played by Liverpool acting stalwart Andrew Schofield and Keddy Sutton), whose description of themselves as “Scouse descendants of the Clangers” had so tickled our neighbour. His potty mouth was entirely in keeping with the ethos of the evening. While Scouse Red Riding Hood is marketed as ‘deffo not for kids’, it features plenty of f-bombs of its own, as well as a good number of genuinely funny moments, including a sequence involving a prominent set of dentures – Cilla’s teeth – and some jolly live music covers of pop anthems from the likes of Queen and The Proclaimers.
Image courtesy of Atanas Paskalev
However, there were moments when the script felt somewhat uninspired. Red made a number of jibes about Blue telling “shit jokes” that were a little too close to the knuckle, and the inevitable digs at neighbouring towns Widnes and Birkenhead were paint-by-numbers. Nothing wrong with a joke about Birkenhead at a Liverpudlian pantomime; in fact it is probably obligatory. But given its audience of Merseysiders, many of them evidently versed in both the Royal Court’s Scouse back catalogue and the city region’s local references, there was surely room for greater originality in Red Riding Hood’s roster of parochial digs.
Nevertheless, the cast was engaging and the musicians were talented – none more so than Chantel Cole, who plays the Stage Manager but is largely there to provide strong backing vocals. The impulse to give her the chance to let rip with her own lead vocal, Whitney Houston’s One Moment in Time, was understandable, but it is hard to think of a scene more crowbarred into a professional production.
To our neighbour, none of this mattered. At the final curtain, he was in raptures about local talent, and informed us enthusiastically that, in his view as a repeat attendee, this was the best Scouse panto yet. To this first timer, who can sometimes find the civic pride and exceptionalism of her home city a little cringe and one dimensional, Scouse Red Riding Hood was far more enjoyable than expected but felt like it could have been sharper. That said, I’m pretty sure that most of the audience agreed with the bloke next to me.
Main image: Andrew Schofield as the Wolf. Image courtesy of Atanas Paskalev.
The Scouse Red Riding Hood is on until January 18, 2024. For more information, click here.
