The Little Mermaid is big business this Christmas, with versions of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale at Hull Truck, Nottingham Playhouse and Newbury’s Watermill, all buoyed perhaps by Disney’s 2023 blockbuster. Adapter Theresa Heskins and her co-director, Vicki Dela Amedume, present theirs as an all-ages gig-theatre show. We’re even introduced to each member of a house band nestled among the audience before meeting the main characters.
Rhiannon Skerritt plays the title role, here named Coralie, in a production that accentuates how Andersen made her the littlest of several merfolk. The romance isn’t entirely extinguished but the power of siblinghood rises to the surface instead in this telling, which also stresses the suspicion and division between the inhabitants of land and water.
Early on, this makes for some upstairs-downstairs comedy as the mermaids tell tales about the world above. But Heskins muddies the waters by showing them to be gleefully cruel and she makes the pearl-diving prince, Caspian (Darcy Braimoh), as guilty of exploitation as the Sea Witch (Harrison Sweeney). A related message about trade feels awkwardly forced, however, as does the show’s ending. It’s also surprising to see the damage to our oceans go unexplored for a young audience.
That was the focus of an eco-fable last Christmas at Bristol Old Vic which conjured the mermaids’ aquatic life through the aerial skills of Holly Downey, a circus director and performer. Downey joins the ensemble here and assists circus choreography by Amedume that befits performers with little wiggle room inside their tailed costumes. Sweeney’s suppleness conveys the witch’s slippery nature in a routine with ropes suggesting how Coralie is ensnared by their deal. The aerial silks blend well with Daniella Beattie’s shimmering projections and performers also use whirlpool-like spiral apparatuses mid-air. Designer Laura Willstead’s stage floor functions as seabed and sand, a maze-like structure is used for the water’s rippling surface (cue golden lighting from Beattie) while Willstead provides glowing rod puppets, too, for iridescent sea creatures.
One challenge for adapters is a heroine whom Andersen depicts as reticent then robs of speech. Heskins tweaks the deal with the witch so that it’s Coralie’s “siren song” that is lost rather than her voice. The witch is voiced in darkness by Inês Sampaio (also doubling as a narrator who fades out of view for too long) while the aerial Sweeney remains silent, eerily emphasising the witch’s longing to steal Coralie’s song.
When she arrives on land, Coralie is given a mock-Shakespearean parlance while Caspian uses extravagantly slangy dialogue – both are jokes that get old very quickly. But Skerritt appealingly handles the physical comedy and ensures a message of goodwill without coming across as goody-goody.
Costume designer Lis Evans gives the band costumes that are funkier than the nevertheless lively and soulful compositions of Arun Ghosh (the lyrics are occasionally drowned out). And when band member Alexander Bean becomes a deus ex machina Poseidon, he does so with a voice as deep as the bottom of the ocean. This is a bubbly production with dark undercurrents but it’s the designs that dazzle.
At New Vic theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, until 24 January
