Pants on Fire's Pinocchio

115270 original

The tale of the fibbing wooden boy with the involuntarily extending conk goes dubstep. The thumping wobbly-bass soundtrack is just the tip of this slick and amusingly unconventional, if somewhat overloaded, retelling of Carlo Collodi’s Disney-popularised kids' classic by multi-skilled London theatre company Pants on Fire.

Sometime in 1950s America, widower Geppetto endeavours to lift himself from the despair of his wife and son’s deaths in a freak nuclear testing accident by carving a marionette out of an old tree stump, much to the meddling fluster of his matronly neighbours.

Brought to life, whether by magic or Geppetto’s psychiatric-drug-addled mind, Pinocchio—portrayed both by a puppet and a live actor—is a brattish little guy who refuses to go to school, instead allowing himself to be led astray by seductive con artists, The Fox and The Cat. En route to learning the error of his ways and finally bringing peace to his poor dad, all sorts of trippy experiences and encounters are had, best of all with a giant cricket that takes the form of a 1950s B-movie monster.

Playing out with pace against a dynamically shifting stage set (everything is styled as if in black and white) it all looks sumptuous, but there’s an abundance of superfluous material squeezed in for what feels like little more than the sake of it – the period-style song-based commercials for cleaning fluids and citrus drinks and so on are funny, but feel devised as if purely to show off the cast’s musical theatre chops. Still, an enjoyable watch and no lie.