If you must insist on a summer panto, then Greece is as good a destination as any. It also works for alliteration. And that is all the justification writer and director Andy McGregor needs for this deliriously daft lunchtime show for A Play, a Pie and a Pint in which a holiday escape leads to a run-in with royalty and a close shave with a bear.
The connection to the land of the classical greats goes no further than a couple of Doric columns on the cheap-and-cheerful cartoon set by Gemma Patchett and Jonny Scott. The Mediterranean setting also gives an excuse for Fraser Boyle’s lusty Dame to strip down to her micro bikini, the better to attract fellow holidaymakers (failing that, a man in the front row).
There are a couple of smashed plates too, but all we care about – and, oddly, I think we do care – is the fate of Rosie Graham’s Goldilocks. Does it lie with Ewan Somers’s splendidly egotistical Prince Pantaloons? “I want a woman with a vacant mind,” he sings with disarming power.
Or is it with Rebekah Lumsden’s ever-so-angry Daddy Bear – the only one of the three bears the budget stretches to? Neither option looks ideal, although the bear cooks a mean broth and his bad temper only makes him more endearing.
That Goldilocks emerges from the woods still her own woman, independent to the last, makes us more than happy to overlook her neurotic tendencies. And Graham gets extra points for going the whole Kate Bush in a “woe is me” song at the point of greatest peril.
McGregor’s gags are as sharp as his songs and the cast, like the show itself, are not too hot, not too cold, but just right.
At Òran Mór, Glasgow, until 23 July.
