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This belter of a production is larger than life, with cartoon accents, embellished dialogue and eye-popping outfits
King Shirley XII has an awful lot of clothes. His dressing room has two double-height rails of them. They stretch from one side of the palace to the other. There are frou-frou skirts, white feather gowns, fur-lined robes, linen jackets and tartan tops. The king doesn’t like any of them. Played by Jeremy Bradfield with a cartoon Italian accent and the petulance of a small child, he could be lost in a backstage wardrobe.
That’s appropriate because everything about Mark Calvert’s Northern Stage production screams theatre. There are the Victorian clamshell footlights on Alison Ashton’s twin-level wooden stage. There is the music-hall bumptiousness of Hannah Goudie-Hunter and Bob Nicholson of children’s company Kitchen Zoo as the itinerant chancers mistaken for tailors.