thu 28/03/2024

The Three Musketeers and the Princess of Spain, Traverse, Edinburgh | reviews, news & interviews

The Three Musketeers and the Princess of Spain, Traverse, Edinburgh

The Three Musketeers and the Princess of Spain, Traverse, Edinburgh

Dumas's classic tale is given a bawdy, hugely entertaining revamp

So this is Christmas, a time to seek comfort in traditional nourishment both culinary and cultural. In Edinburgh, the King’s Theatre has been home to mainstream panto - the equivalent of serving up a hearty turkey with all the trimmings – since time immemorial, which leaves the capital’s other theatres jockeying for position. What to do? Hedge all bets and aim for different-but-not-too-different, or raise the stakes and try something more adventurous altogether?

This time of year tends to produce a bit of hit and a whole lot of miss. Last year the Lyceum disappointed with a sluggish, dull-as-ditchwater Peter Pan which felt as though a dozen Boxing Day hangovers had come all at once. This year they've plumped for The Snow Queen, while the Festival Theatre is doing The Secret Garden; I haven’t yet seen either, but both will have to go some to match the Traverse’s offering, which dares to stick something bold in the festive slot (fear not: such crass innuendo is entirely in keeping with the production) and in doing so manages to enjoy the best of both worlds.

The Three Musketeers and the Princess of Spain is packed full of the broad wit and bawdy humour essential to a good panto (there's a send-up of the whole “Oh no he isn’t!” rigmarole, while the villainous Cardinal is booed and hissed with relish) but it’s also a deeply satisfying and visually sophisticated piece of modern theatre.

A joint production between the Traverse, the Belgrade Theatre Coventry and English Touring Theatre, Chris Hannan’s new play, directed by Dominic Hill, uses Dumas’s classic swashbuckling tale merely as a launch pad. This comic romp with a touch of darkness around the edges owes as much to the youthful spirit of the 1980s TV cartoon Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds as to the brick-like original novel, and is all the better for it. It positively fizzes with pace and energy.

Teenage sweethearts in rural France, Constance and D’Artagnan are parted when she is sold to the evil Cardinal to begin a new life as a maltreated dogsbody in the city. In order to numb the sorrow, Constance lures D’Artagnan across the Lost Stream, where he loses all his emotional faculties and no longer recognises her or any of his finer feelings. 

MusketeerPrincessNine years later the pair meet again by chance in Paris. Constance, still toiling for the Cardinal, remains lovelorn, but  D’Artagnan does not - cannot - reciprocate. He arrives in tandem with the Princess of Spain, whom he rescued from the Cardinal’s men as she travelled to marry the King of France. By now, he is a cold, unfeeling, lonely young man who wants only to fight for the King's musketeers.

The bad news is that the Cardinal has locked up all the musketeers in the Bastille. The good news is that three old war dogs have escaped his reach, though they are not quite the imposing figures they once were. Porthos, delightfully played by Peter Forbes in the grand lineage of Scottish effeminacy which includes Stanley Baxter, the recently deceased Gerard Kelly and Alan Cumming, is a camp, delusional, morbid over-eater experiencing a phantom pregnancy; Athos (Nicholas Asbury) is an embittered alcoholic who gives off the surly aura of a dethroned rock star, and who wears shades to keep the horrors of daylight at bay; Aramis, played with show-stealing élan by Cliff Burnett, enters the fray as a jaded lothario, leather keks, greying ponytail and all, singing sub-Julio Iglesias fare with one elbow on the piano and both eyes on the prowl, training for the priesthood so he can love even more women “just a little bit deeper”.

The old gang are like The A Team, only with epees and rapiers rather than grenades and cigars

There’s a decidedly Beckettian sense of grotesque absurdity hanging over these three ragged soldiers hiding out in a dingy cellar, and real pathos in their bickering bond. After their first comeback fight they’re too knackered to even complete their catchphrase: “One for all and....” is as much as they manage before creaking to the floor with an exhausted “Ooof”. Add to their ranks damaged D’Artagnan, “looking for emotions”, and there are four broken, misshapen social misfits trying out for heroic status.

They are aided by Constance and Beatriz Romily’s princess (pictured above right), a haughty delight pitched somewhere between Andrew Sach's Manuel, Miranda Richardson's Elizabeth I in Blackadder II and Penelope Cruz's Maria in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Mysteriously pregnant, she abandons her newborn baby on Christmas Eve and it falls into the hands of the giant, skeletal, baby-eating monster Lord Mandeville, who stalks outside the city walls and promises to gobble up the child unless D’Artagnan can answer one question: "What is the greatest thing in the world?" The boy with no heart has three days to find out.

DCWith the old gang energised by new blood and primed for one last hurrah – like The A Team, only with epees and rapiers rather than grenades and cigars - the game is afoot. Act Two isn’t quite as zippy as Act One, but it all zooms towards a neatly negotiated finale, when the forces of good triumph against the crooked Cardinal, and the monstrous Mandeville is vanquished. Weddings loom on the horizon (where, thankfully, they remain), and yes, our hero discovers that the answer to the eternal question begins with 'L' and ends in 'E'.

The moral might be as old as the Pyrennees, but D'Artagnan and Constance (pictured left, played by Oliver Gomm and Cynthia Erivo) are far from the sugary sweet couple of fairy-tale convention: lust gushes from their love like steam from a kettle, and the bedroom is rarely far from their – and especially her – thoughts. Indeed, the entire production is admirably earthy and unsentimental, pebble-dashed with bawdy and occasionally scatological humour. One Parisian street seller advertises “Second-hand soup: extra thick”, while D’Artagnan asks the princess: “Do royal babies come out of the normal place or somewhere posher?”

Colin Richmond’s set is wonderfully versatile and its sombre, sinister greys and browns somehow manage to dazzle. The bleached, bony Lord Mandeville, meanwhile, is a Tim Burton-esque marvel that's both horrific and pathetic, his long blood-stained fingers reaching out for companionship as much as young bones on which to lunch. Live music weaves in and out of the action to fine effect. Without fuss, the cast hop on and off drums, piano, guitar and fiddle, offering incidental flourishes, atmospheric SFX and fully fledged song interludes.

Save for an almost apologetic trickle of snowfall and a rather spurious seasonal setting, there is nothing particularly Christmassy about The Three Musketeers and the Princess of Spain. It did, however, send me out into the deep blue northern evening with a smile on my face and a warm glow. And contemplating something other than turkey for this year's festive repaste.

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