Ballad of the Skull Fairy

It is to the deafening roar of poetry—in a West Country accent by a figure in a Stig-of-the-Dump costume—that this show opens ... and it only gets odder as it goes on. West country poems (about poo) are replaced by a papier-maché squid, some arm-flailing, and lots of extravagant costumes. Most of this material sounds more suited to children, but the vocabulary of the play, littered as it is with “colon-tickling”, penises, wanking and literally scores of instances of the f-word, most decidedly is not.

Despite the crudeness of their script, the actors in this play are both very likeable, and deliver their (albeit nonsensical) story rather charmingly, if at slightly too high a volume. Some moments really do rouse us into a delighted response, such as a character’s enthusiasm to buy each member of the audience a guinea pig, a hilarious truism about Lidl, and some very endearing ad-libbing.

However, the content is silly and, if it weren’t for all the references to anal sex, paedophilia and occasionally–rather unsettlingly—Hitler, it really would be no more than a children’s pantomime. The plethora of obscenities we are showered with must be an attempt to render the show funnier and less childish, but, although the teenagers in the front row laugh uproariously at each crude gesture and word, this rudeness is, in fact, its flaw: it makes it totally unsuitable for children, and yet the piece as a whole is just far too silly for a mature audience not to grow bored.