Snow White at Theatre Royal, Portsmouth: Cast rises to the challenge despite illness | Review

But to lose two is just downright careless.

Seriously (not an expression often used around panto, admittedly) though, this is the scenario that faces Snow White at Theatre Royal in Portsmouth when their Nurse Nelly (Harry Howle) and Muddles (Christian James) are struck down by illness.

In his role as the combined Portsmouth Theatres’ artistic director – and on a night off from playing Widow Twankey in Aladdin down the road at The Kings – Jack Edwards comes on before the curtain rises to let us know and asks us to give the understudies a boost.

They need not have worried – the audience is fully behind Danny Lee West as the dame, and Matt Dingley as Muddles. There is an enormous amount of good will in the room towards the pair and they have fun with their second-string status – even forcing the Wicked Queen, Julia Worsley, to restart a scene because they give her the giggles.

However, it’s Worsley who comes dangerously close to stealing every scene she’s in. A staple cast member of The Kings’ ‘Pompey Panto’, this is her first time in Theatre Royal’s festive offering.

And she’s loving being bad to the bone – she laps up the boos and plays up to the audience shamelessly. As for her evil cackle? Best in the business...

This is also a very rock’n’roll queen. She announces her entrance to a version of The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy For The Devil, and later also gets to perform their Painted Black, before – and this must be a local panto first – Black Night by Deep Purple in act two.

Fred Dinenage makes a fun cameo appearance as the Magic Mirror. As he says of the regular references to his younger demographic-baffling TV show, How: “Ask you parents.”

It’s no longer PC to have seven dwarfs, so instead we have seven ‘little people’ played by children, with names slightly different from the Disney version – Mardy, Sniffly, Smiler, and so on – presumably for copyright reasons. On press night we have the orange team who perform admirably, carrying several of the scenes.

Darcy James plays the nice-but-dim Prince Charming with aplomb while Sophie-Rose Emery is an appropriately winsome Snow White. The romantic pairing have some nice chemistry and their duets work well – Emery has got a belter of a voice.

My children always act as my barometer of how a panto is going, and I am happy to report they laughed themselves silly (as did I, if not always for the same reasons) and joined in with gusto.

Amazingly, this is apparently the first time in the Theatre Royal’s history that Snow White has been their panto. Here’s to many more for the fairest of them all.