It was another packed week at the LCW with people forced into corners as a fresh stock of actors took to the stage.  With Christmas just round the corner it seems fitting that this week’s feature script was a modern retelling of Cinderella dubbed Cinders.   The finished product is due to be performed in Primrose Gardens, Belsize Park on the 12th, 13th, 18th (adults only special) 19th and 20th of December (more details soon). The big lesson for other writers at the LCW to learn from this reading is how beneficial a polished cast actors are to a reading. Although we try to cast scripts ahead of the meetings, we don’t have the time to rehearse them, so to some extent much of the reading is done on sight. Sarah and Tom took the time to put together a cast who were fully aware of what the roles required and were thus able to give a confident performance.

Moving onto the script itself, there was much debate about traditional pantomime laws (someone said the army had to be involved, someone else said you can no longer throw out sweets as health and safety wants to prevent blindness by Haribo). A phrase often used is “You must know the rules before you can break them”, and in the case of ‘Cinders’ while there was a nod towards the panto genre, there was much that seemed missing.  There was no audience participation song, no cries of “behind you you”, very few double entendres and the Ugly Sisters were woefully underused as villains to rile up the crowd and make Cinders’ life a misery. But all of these points are easily fixed in rewrites and after all that is why a script comes to the group.

Structurally the script suffered from a large ensemble cast all fighting for attention.  The traditional role of Buttons was split between him and a new character dubbed ‘Narrator’, Buttons came off worse in this deal.  Instead of being the best friend and confident of Cinders he just wandered in every now and again giving him very little opportunity to interact with the audience or become a character we cared about.   In this humble writers opinion the two characters would be better off if they merged into one serving the duel purpose of guiding the audience and also showing us why we care about what happens to Cinders.

As mentioned before the ugly sisters were underused, they should be more involved in Cinder’s miserable life so we can see why she wants to escape to a better life.  However this use of introducing something and not using it to full effect within the story was perhaps the biggest problem.  With so many ideas being thrown on the table many of them felt like weird insider jokes rather than tools of story telling. The lesson here is if you introduce an idea, you should pay it off. In Cinders one of the characters can read minds, it is repeated over and over again and in the end the skill is used to find Cinders in the basement… except like a real mind reader, he only claims that she is in there after she burps and someone says “that must be her!”  So there was no reason for the character to have this skill.  A comparison would a Bond film where Bond gets given a car that can go underwater and then gets in a boat to cross a river. Sometimes these things remain in a script because it is hard to bite the bullet and kill your darlings, but sometimes it has to be done.

On the plus side Cinders is an ambitious project with a very talented cast, there are some fantastic characters such as the Supreme Makeover Fairy (an excellent modernisation of the fairy god mother) who really lift the script up.  I have no doubt that the production will have successful run, so stay tuned for details in the near future.

Finally there is no pantomime law that says the army has to be involved.