Theatre / Reviews
Review: Goldilock, Stock & Three Smoking Bears
Rupert the Bear berating Paddington Bear for the murder of a London gangster is surely the finest moment of festive theatre you’ll see on stage in Bristol this year.
This pair are joined by an achingly hip Winnie to make up the trio in Goldilock, Stock & Three Smoking Bears, an original production – and boy, it’s original – by The Wardrobe Theatre in their brand new home.
In the week that it was revealed the Brewery Theatre in Ashton is to temporarily close, this show is being performed in a venue of similar proportions.
is needed now More than ever
Some 100 people are seated around two sides of the square room as the Wardrobe Theatre spreads its wings from their original location in a disused junk room above the White Bear pub in Kingsdown.
Opening with a bang in their new abode hidden at the back of The Old Market Assembly, the Wardrobe team have programmed as their debut show in BS2 what has become one of the staples of Bristol’s Christmas theatre season, an amorphous mash-up of stories that in the past has spliced The Muppets and Die Hard and conjoined Puss in Boots with Oedipus; and this time mixes traditional fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears with the Guy Ritchie crime caper Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
Those two titles alone are an indication that this was a marriage made in heaven, and there are belly laughs aplenty amid the extortion rackets, porridge pilfering and ‘h’ dropping.
Four actors play a dozen characters in a splendidly surreal show. They include Vinnie who walks around constantly kicking a football and sometimes attending to his accordion-playing baby son, to a cameo from a very Geordie and very luminous Sting.
Goldilock (Emma Keaveney-Roys) is an orphaned market trader who has fallen on hard times. She gets caught up in some nefarious dealings, ends up owing money to those she really shouldn’t and along the way steals the porridge of the three bears.
A simple set is made up of a battered old sofa, lamp, and a table and chairs on which Harry (played with exuberant gusto by Harry Humberstone, above) shouts at those in the criminal fraternity on a lower rung of the ladder than him.
Directed by Adam Fuller, it’s all very silly but very very funny – the perfect introduction to the Wardrobe Theatre’s new home.
Goldilock, Stock & Three Smoking Bears is at the Wardrobe Theatre until January 17. For tickets and more information, visit www.thewardrobetheatre.com/livetheatre/goldilock-stock-three-smoking-bears/
Photos by Paul Blakemore
Read more reviews of 2015’s Christmas theatre shows in Bristol
Our top newsletters emailed directly to you
