Oxford’s Smash Hits Sleeping Beauty a blast from the past

Sleeping Beauty
at the Oxford Playhouse
until January 5

By JON LEWIS

Back to the Future

Sleeping Beauty, written and directed by Toby Hulse, transports the Oxford Playhouse audience back to the 80s, or rather that part of the decade dedicated to cheesy pop bands.

The Smash Hits annual yearbook plays the same role that the DeLorean car does in the 80s movie Back to the Future, containing an unlikely prototype for a time machine. The song that probably gave Hulse the concept for the production, Dead or Alive’s 1985 hit You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) of course accompanies the pricking of Princess Aurora’s thumb on the fateful spinning wheel. The rest of the remixed eighties numbers naturally emerge, heralded by the hits spun on decks by the pre-show DJs.

Hulse writes comic plots for this pantomime with an Ayckbourn-like coherence. Ideas are planted early on that whose significance only appears later in the show. There are two central time zones (if Aurora’s birthday with the fairies’ wishes is discounted): a thousand years in the past in Oxenland in 895 on the 18th birthday of Aurora (Sophia Lewis), the day she’s due to become queen.

The spinning wheel plot, devised by Walter the Wicked (Robin Hemmings, reprising a baddie role from last year’s Jack and the Beanstalk, is designed to change history. To prove his success, Walter and his daughter, Ursula the Unsure (Daisy Ann Fletcher), Aurora and her bestie Billy the Silly (Max Guest, another returnee from last year) travel to 1985 where the land is, for Walter, delightfully colourless and boring, although more interesting than Swindon (it wouldn’t be a Playhouse panto without a playful dig at the other, other place. The rest of the plot is about reversing this bleak future.

There’s a delightful performance by Elliott Wooster as Mark-o, the good fairy whose speeches are lifted from 80s pop songs. Dressed like Boy George in his Bow Wow Wow and Culture Club days, Mark-o is the narrative glue that holds the plots together, with Wooster a natural, understated presence.

Comedienne Lucy Frederick as the dame, Nelly the Nurse, delivers the few smutty lines in the show.

A poptastic confection.