Once Upon a Mattress – Upstairs at the Gatehouse

Beth Burrows in Once Upon A Mattress at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, London. Picture: Andreas Lambis

Once Upon a Mattress continues at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, London until 29 March 2020.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

It’s no easy task to improve upon the elegant and timeless storytelling of Hans Christian Andersen, but Once Upon a Mattress – the 1959 musical comedy with score by Mary Rodgers and words by Marshall Barer, Jay Thompson and Dean Fuller – achieves just that.

The Princess and the Pea is one of Andersen’s lesser fables: a tale of a prince testing his future bride’s worthiness by placing a single pea beneath her 20 mattresses. She notices this slight discomfort and complains, which proves her to be a better person than a gracious and grateful houseguest would have been. Somehow. Royalty is weird.

Anyway, Once Upon a Mattress transforms this flimsy raw material into two hours of fabulous entertainment, not simply through the addition of great songs (and if you think that doesn’t improve any given story you are surely on the wrong website), but by transferring the worst of the prince’s fussiness onto his mother and making the princess a badass jolt of foreign energy in their staid, boring kingdom. Who can’t relate to the fight against overprotective parents and the humdrum institutions they hold dear? The show pushes for universal appeal and six decades of enduring popularity and frequent revivals suggest it has been successful.

This new production at Highgate’s Upstairs at the Gatehouse Theatre is scaled-down, but between the six-piece band and ten-strong cast not an inch of space is wasted. The set is noticeably more cardboard-based than your typical West End affair, but is effectively designed with some clever details by Giulia Scrimieri.

The band – led by the head-bopping of musical director Jessica Douglas – sound fantastic. It’s one thing making three-piece rock scores work in a small theatre, but it’s rare to hear such effective reduced arrangements of full orchestral scores.

Rachael Louise Miller and Scott Armstrong open the show as a loving young couple, and draw the audience into their dilemma of a pre-marital pregnancy so effectively we forget it’s actually 2020 and such stakes shouldn’t be at all concerning. They are unable to marry and earn respectability until Theo Toksvig-Stewart’s Prince Dauntless has found his match, and thus we are immediately invested. The picky prince of the original story is made sympathetic by Toksvig-Stewart’s likeable if wet portrayal, and the terrifying presence of a bellowing Julia Faulkner as his monster of a mother, Queen Aggravain.

We have to wait a whole five musical numbers (including a reprise) before we are introduced to the show’s star. Beth Burrows’ Princess Winnifred bursts onto stage half an hour in, soaked through after having just swam across the moat (though somehow still not as wet as Toksvig-Stewart’s Prince).

Burrows plays her part with such energy and brilliant comic choices that she could have wandered in from Mars, which is of course the point. The fictional kingdom of the play is medieval Europe and Princess Winnifred is Liza Minnelli meets Gilmore Girls. Her motivations are barely touched upon but we cheer this weird character to her goal regardless. The stranger has come to town and we are enraptured by the mess she makes.

As the title and tag line (“The musical about love, lechery, and a legume”) suggest, this show is saucier than your typical fairytale. The production gleefully leans into the bawdiness, but keeps everything euphemistic enough to make it appropriate for children.

Less appropriate are some minor but uncomfortable moments of Benny Hill-esque, old-school sexism left over from the 1950s book. They are small next to to the main plot of a strong woman being amazing and achieving her goals, but because of this it seems even more of a shame that those awkward moments aren’t downplayed or removed entirely.

Apart from this, director Mark Giesser has done a fine job with his production. The concessions to budget just add to the charm and the not-yet-West-End-slick moments will surely be ironed out shortly into the show’s month-long run. Yes, you can get a gods seat at a major professional production for the ticket price, but small-scale theatre like this deserves our support.

If you go expecting an unpolished but very well-acted 50s musical comedy that is still laugh-out-loud funny, you will not be disappointed, and will no doubt have more fun on the front row of this small theatre than at the back of the glittering and gilded auditoria further south. After two hours, the Gatehouse’s seats may not be the most comfortable, but I guess that just means I am a refined princess fit for royalty after all. I knew it.

Ian Bowkett