Writer: Joshua Coley
Director: Anton Tweedale
The Liar, The Bitch, and the Wardrobe – it’s C. S. Lewis’s classic children’s tale like you’ve never seen it before. Battersea’s Turbine Theatre bring us Narnia: gloriously queer and with a naughty adult panto twist. The perfect amount of silly for your Christmas season.
Just enough time to set the scene in Blitz-ridden London, evacuees Peter (Yannick Budd) and Edward (Conor Headley), who are hiding a saucy secret of their own, are whisked off to the countryside and out of the physical and proverbial closet. They are not brothers, and are 18 years old, something they make abundantly clear to justify the adult content later in the production, providing an excellent opportunity for a Schofield joke – ‘unwise, but not illegal’.
Joshua Coley’s excellent script walks that line between euphemism and controversial jokes throughout, and the laughs are thick and fast, particularly to the chronically online. If you knew Moo Deng from the start, laugh at the mention of Gary Barlow’s son, or know what it means to hold space for the lyrics of Defying Gravity, there are bags of extra laughs for you.
The brilliant cast of just four carries off humour, countless characters, speedy costume changes, and sharp dance moves with panto excellence. They sing, stage manage, and tell the story of the other side of the wardrobe, featuring almost familiar characters of Mr Topless, Asslan, and The Hungry Beaver. Laced with euphemisms, Anton Tweedale’s direction balances earnest panto storytelling and self-awareness, singing through the summer’s greatest hits, of course featuring Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX.
Grant Cartwright gives a standout performance as the effervescent panto villain, The Tight Bitch. Clearly a pro at crowd work, Cartwright is the source and butt of many of the jokes and a captivating presence. Holly Ashman, too, is a scene stealer in every appearance, as evil toothless sidekick Moo-Deng and the big-bottomed Lion Asslan, to name just a few. Conor Headley is able to move at high speed from the cockney London boy Edward to Narnia’s mythical creatures and is the vocal power behind the show. All performers know when to extend a joke or wink at the audience and speed through puns at an extraordinary rate.
But adult themes and bawdy jokes don’t stop the childish playfulness of panto remaining. Rounds of call and response are still met with enthusiasm and squeals of excitement when ‘Daddy’ Christmas turns up. Throwing snowballs at the stage, singing songs: it’s, undeniably, lots of fun.
The production loses the plot, both in narrative and in sanity, by the end. In a way that still brings many laughs but also slightly tires the audience. Given that conveniently tying up loose ends of the plot in an unlikely way becomes part of the jokes, there’s no reason the production stretches on for thirty minutes longer than it should. Actors corpsing on stage is a part of the panto fun, but by this point in the plot, it just veers into laziness. But most is forgiven in the sheer silliness of it all, and a perfect reminder that Christmas panto can be naughty, gay and for adults.
Homoerotic, hilarious, puntastic – The Liar, The Bitch, and the Wardrobe is as funny as the name suggests. Head to The Turbine Theatre for some naughty Christmas fun.
Runs until 22 December 2024
