You can see why Lynda Radley was wary about taking on Cinderella. How can a playwright give agency to a character who is exploited by her family then swept away by a handsome prince? One circumstance may be preferable to the other but neither gives her a say. Radley’s solution is to provide Cinderella with some welly – that is in addition to the two wellies she spends much of the play talking to.
Played with brightness and energy by Hannah Visocchi, she is a hard-working farmer concentrating on her carrots while her vacuous siblings Florence and Laurence (Leah Byrne and Adam Greene) forge careers as wellbeing influencers.
Proud of her green fingers, she is initially dismissive of Liam (Jatinder Singh Randhawa), an environmental engineering student with no farming experience, but at the same time she is unnerved by his superior knowledge of soil chemistry. If she is going to save the family farm from property developer Apollo King (John Macaulay), she will need lessons in humility as well as independence of mind.
But in Jemima Levick’s production, the story falls between two stools. It has the ambitions of serious drama but the appearance of a pantomime. By rights, we should be booing Ann Louise Ross as the self-serving stepmother – the character certainly deserves it – but the tone demands we hold our peace. Likewise, we would laugh at Florence and Laurence if they were not presented as conflicted characters on the road to redemption.
Enlivened by Michael John McCarthy’s chamber-pop score, it is a cheerful show. But in muting the extremes of the archetypal story, it reduces the urgency of Cinderella’s transformation from innocence to adulthood without giving full weight to the alternative story of land mismanagement and greed.
At Dundee Rep until 31 December
