Pantomime
The Three Little Pigs, Platform, Glasgow
THREE STARS
With the weather doing all it can to huff and puff and blow everything down, the Wolf is upping his game, and his ambitions. What's this? The big bad wolf is really a big bad businessman in wolf's clothing - actually a big, comic-book cut-out - and he's called Ronald Pump and he wants to destroy the ancient woodland and build a golf course? The littlest ones in the audience won't relish this nifty gambit beyond the fartacious innuendo of the name or Maryam Hamidi's villainous sneaking about, but older kids and adults will catch on to the drawling Yankee accent and the rampant wig as well.
What of the pigs? The three sisters are motherless little porkers whose tendency to fall out among themselves has made them, and not just their houses, vulnerable to dastardly types like Pump. Boom! Effie (Ashley Smith) might be a fitness fanatic, but her straw house is too weak to withstand Pump's explosive charge. Eilidh (Steven Rae) is a bookish blue-stocking but being a smuggins clever clogs doesn't mean you know anything about men. Boom! her house of sticks is twigs. It's left to the youngest, Elspeth (Gemma McElhinney), to prove wiser than her sisters, and not just by building her home with bricks.
Writer Lewis Hetherington , director Matt Addicott and designer Claire Halleran have again joined forces to fill the Platform stage with a good-looking, cleverly modern twist on an old morality tale. Panto hi-jinks are mixed in with the side-swipes at greedy developers while Michael John McCarthy's sound-score has us blown away - Piggie-piggie disco-disco is a sty-lish number we would all trot our stuff to at any Woodland Hoedown Throwdown!
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