The Legend of Rooney’s Ring overview – legendary Wayne and Coleen bust-up turns into mythically foolish panto | Theatre

Sometimes pretend information could be enjoyable. Take the time phrase went round Liverpool {that a} livid Coleen McLoughlin had taken off Wayne Rooney’s engagement ring and thrown it right into a bush. The metropolis’s detectorists got here out in drive.

Things bought so out of hand that the National Trust needed to ban treasure seekers from the Formby Point nature reserve for worry the seek for the £25,000 ring would disturb the squirrels. The proof of Coleen being within the squirrel sanctuary, not to mention discarding the ring, is on the fictional facet of flimsy.

Screenwriter turned playwright Helen Serafinowicz has the comedian intuition to see how humorous that is. She additionally has the creativeness to take it one step additional.

In The Legend of Rooney’s Ring, she reframes an city fantasy as a real fantasy. It is ready in a netherworld midway between the Brothers Grimm and JRR Tolkien, the place a storybook princess generally known as C’leen (a sparky Emma Grace Arends) falls in love with a warrior by the unlikely title of Wayne (a brutish John May).

It seems to be as if the impediment to their romance will likely be C’leen’s regal mother and father, however the menace is way worse: getting into with the menace of Darth Vader is an orange-faced Emperor Trump (a bullying Terry Mynott) who casts a spell on Wayne. For so long as the warrior possesses the ring, he will likely be irresistible to ladies. His destiny, because the play has it, is to be a fanny magnet.

Delivered with the type of pantomime panache for which this theatre is famed, Stephen Fletcher’s manufacturing is a brassy mixture of broad-brushstroke confrontations and vigorous pop songs (some extra pertinent than others). But pantomimes are sustained by archetypal forces of excellent and evil, with out which the silliness turns into tiresome.

That is what occurs right here: the Rooney’s relationship within the play is just too shallow to care about and Emperor Trump’s real-life counterpart is much extra a menace than this cartoonish dolt and his need to make Liverpool nice once more. After a gap scene during which wild-haired peasants hunt for the ring, Serafinowicz veers off the factor that made this story humorous within the first place. Instead, she turns a promising concept right into a two-hour Crackerjack sketch.