Broke Britannia!

theSpace @ Venue45
23-28 August, 20:10

There’s a scene in the original film of The Producers where Bialystock and Bloom look over various awful scripts to find the worst possible production to stage. Were it not woefully anachronistic, I could easily imagine Broke Britannia! being considered. This musical about the credit crunch has an exceptionally weak plot, complete with sub-par Gilbert and Sullivan-esque numbers that feature some truly atrocious rhyming couplets (‘when my boss sees I’m a star / he’ll promise me that new Ferrar /…i’).

Given that the actors are required to play many different roles during the piece, their lack of versatility as an ensemble is painfully apparent. While claiming that ‘we love to sing and dance / to the strains of high finance’, I imagine that they were only convinced that this production was a good idea through a process of mass hypnosis. I concede that Divina (Libby Gore) has a lovely singing voice, but other than that, Broke Britannia! is as doomed as the situation it attempts to parody. It’s half-heartedly peddled as a ‘pantomime’, but maybe that’s festival slang for a laughably shoddy script acted with all the conviction of a particularly dull school play.

– Miranda Fay Thomas