Festive offering goes without a twang

Reporter: Paul Genty
Date published: 06 December 2013


WANTED! ROBIN HOOD, Lowry, Salford to January 11
AFTER the award-winning success of last year’s Christmas show, the Library aims at another story from myth and legend, from the same direction and design team.

All the targets were ready to hit, then, but where last year’s “Arabian Nights” selection box had entertaining stories, lively storytelling and a light touch, this new adaptation of the Hood legend, by Charles Way, manages to make quite dull what has always seemed pretty exciting.

It might leave you wondering exactly who the show is for, since it includes a few jokes, a stabbing and some (not very graphic) torture.

And it’s not simply a question of the script, though its lack of imagination is the most telling problem. The evening offers little that is very exciting and worse, does it in a health and safety-ish, “bows but not arrows” way.

The archery contest between the disguised Robin and the Sheriff is particularly silly: the target is almost above the heads of the competitors and they fire, well, nothing, from bows that vary from the sheriff’s ruthless killer to Robin’s, which wouldn’t look out of place under the tree for a five year old on Christmas morning.

The ordinariness of the script has clearly had a knock-on effect on director Amy Leach, who gets another strong castle-wall set from designer Hayley Grindle with its tall doors, windows and balconies, but clearly doesn’t get much inspiration from the words.

The script reaches a low point at the start of act two, when Marion (Amelia Donkor), alone on stage, is left to describe the raiding and robbing of the rich and giving back to the poor that makes the Hood story so popular.

Curiosities of the casting are tolerable: the Liverpudlian Ciaran Kellgren as the man of Nottingham, or possibly South Yorkshire, is just one of those things; as is the casting of Little John (Umar Malik) as a lanky, thin-but-only-slightly-taller-than-most figure, rather than the man-mountain one expects.

Most successful characters of the night are the nasty ones: Christopher Wright is good as the oily steward, and Emilio Doorgasingh nastily watchable as the Sheriff. He’s no Alan Rickman, but he grabs attention like nothing else here.