The Wooden Frock
BAC, London

Ruth Sheldon

The Kneehigh Theatre Company believe that a folk story is like a stone - something simple, but when you lift it up there are all sorts of ghastly things crawling about underneath. With this current production, they have successfully created a multi-layered experience. Combining fairytale frothiness and physical humour with dark, uneasy undertones, The Wooden Frock turns the Cinderella theme inside out.

Mary (Amanda Lawrence) is a princess whose glamorous and sexy, feather-boa swathed mother suddenly dies. Prior to her death, mother extracts a promise from her husband, Mary's doting father; whoever her wedding ring fits shall be his next wife. Yet this is no familiar fairy-tale search for the perfect bride; it is Mary that the ring fits. Now she must escape the secure world of her idyllic childhood, setting off in a protective wooden frock to meet her prince, as the uncomfortable possibility of incest permeates our tale.

This is a production that transports you back to the innocent world of fairy-stories whilst constantly reminding you of your own adulthood. The humour is often laugh-out-loud silly; Mike Shepard as Nurse and Alex Murdoch as Ronald create a pantomime-esque atmosphere, and the cast takes delight in audience participation. From the outset, however, the audience is given a sense of adult undercurrents, of which Princess Mary is naively unaware. Particularly in the first half, childish innocence is constantly intertwined with sexuality; the family home is a big bed in which Mary hears her bedtime story and is sent to sleep, whereupon the audience witnesses her parents' sexual relationship (the potency of which is then defused by the comic timing of Nurse checking under the bed for woodworm).

This tension between innocent humour and underlying sexuality is drawn out by the dual roles taken by most members of the cast. As father, there is an aged pathos about John Burman, with his old man's pyjamas and gaping shirt; and this quality is comically reflected in the pleading, randy dog that he plays in the second half. Yet his shirt is also uncomfortably revealing, and his yearning for love and affection transforms him into a sexual predator - a metamorphosis which is unbearable for his daughter and hugely discomforting for the audience.

Kneehigh use the simplicity of a folk tale to explore the blurring of all kinds of boundaries. Objects have multiple meanings; the ring that condemns Mary to her father also identifies her to the prince as the mysterious woman he desires. The wooden frock itself is the armour that protects her on her journey, but it must be dismantled if she is to be recognised as a woman. Confusion over the age of characters is comic in the case of a bald, mummy's-boy prince, yet tragic in the light of Mary's father's refusal to distinguish her from his wife. The company is able to walk this tightrope between comedy and tragedy, childhood and adulthood by imaginatively manipulating props, and incorporating puppetry, film and diverse styles of music.

The Wooden Frock is a reflection on lost innocence, a production that successfully conveys a child-like enthusiasm for story-telling whilst uncovering plenty of ghastly things for the audience to poke about with.

Till 25 April.