Anyone who has watched Little Britain will immediately recognize the evil, yet sad, club leader stereotype, alongside a girl that eats her feelings, a curvaceous (and self-confident) sexpot, a “chubby chaser”, a dowdy mummy, and a guy who comes along just to kill some time, flirt and take the mickey.

The show opens with an overture and introduction song (“I’ve Tried Every Single Diet”) in which we learn a bit about each character and the lengths they’ve gone to (or not) to loose a few pounds. The Nazi-like club leader inducts our cast and, over the course of several scenes (or “weeks” in the club), we follow each character through their personal journeys and evolving relationships with each other. The whole thing plays out like an elongated, but enjoyable, sit-com.

The music is a bit forgettable, but inoffensive, as is the vocal talent of the cast. The lyrics are alternately cute, functional, funny and repetitive, and could use a little more spice. I found myself longing for the zingy naughtiness of something like Avenue Q.

As fringe musicals go, Fat Club is not groundbreaking, or terribly exciting, but it is entertaining and there are enough funny moments to engage all but the most critical of theatregoers.

On the one hand there are Felicity (Muireann Ryan) and her cousin Christian (Simon Desborough). Both are living in a housing estate in the East End, the squalor of which has been newly highlighted by the 2012 Olympic village a few yards away. Christian is a disillusioned solider recently returned from some desert war. In order to cope with his disappointment, he has created his own personal enemy: the government is not to be trusted, all immigrants should be kicked out of the UK, so that the ‘real’ English people finally receive what is their due. In contrast, Felicity is ready to believe in the hope of a better future that the Games promise. Her son Billy, a fifteen year old boxing champion, has just been admitted to the team. Through him, she can dream of success, a fair reward for her untiring care for Christian’s bed-ridden mother.

On the other hand we encounter Ismail (Lowell Baricanosa) and his wife Anna (Linda Lowell). He is a Muslim policeman, she a news reporter from Bosnia. Both are trying to assimilate into the British culture they so admire. Unfortunately the play’s development reveals that Ismail and Anna have invested themselves into a constructed version of reality – like Felicity and Christian; maybe like all of us. Their house of cards is going to collapse all too soon.

Director Dominic Kelly and the actors tell these stories in a remarkably relaxed state though nonetheless charged with energy. Strange though it may sound, it is rare to see actors having fun on stage (no matter how serious the topic). It is this sense of enjoyment that allows the performers of The Day They Banned Christmas to retain a calm, focused, and recommendable unsensational way of storytelling even when the events become more drastic.

These darker and more ruthless energies burst into the play in the form of a bomb, exploding in the Olympic Stadium and killing 40 people – amongst them Felicity’s son Billy. It is in these moments that Muireann Ryan displays the true brilliance of her emotional scale: she encapsulates the total shock and confusion in her distracted singing of Genesis songs, her nervous fingering of the brown paper bag holding the leftovers of Billy’s possessions. The effect is both tender and unsettlingly funny.

Ryan’s ability to create an extremely touching scene is even more remarkable when considering that the explosion itself is curiously ineffective. It is depicted only through a woefully inadequate recorded sound effect, but fails to really penetrate into the world of the play. Katie Lias’ stage design, dominated by a central fragmented wall, made me hope for a complete confusion of the play’s world somewhat like in Sarah Kane’s Blasted. Instead, the explosion takes place in another dimension. It is possible that this complete separation of the blast and the situation on stage is intended – a vague strangeness of the sound, as if it were coming from under water hints at this – but since this is not fully realised, it failed to make a palpable impression.

Since the bomb was allegedly planted by Al-Quaeda, violence against the Muslim population in Britain increases so drastically that the government creates specific ‘zones’ for their protection – zones that sound suspiciously like ghettos. Following several instances of harassment, Anna and Ismail have to move to the former Olympic Village, which has been converted into one of these walled-in districts. After the first encounter of the four characters in the hospital following the bombing, Anna and Felicity’s lives cross one more time when Felicity invades Anna’s new flat in her quest for revenge against the Muslims whom she holds responsible for her son’s death.

I do not want to give away the final twist of the story. Suffice it to say that the two men also meet one more time in a direct face-off. However, the information revealed in this confrontation is ultimately too contrived. Overall, the play is a well-crafted piece of storytelling, but the ending is just too neat to do justice to the chaos of racial hatred, bigotry, and distrust raised throughout the evening. What could have been a truly unsettling story turns into one of many conspiracy theories. Nonetheless, The Day They Banned Christmas remains a powerful play with a consistently strong cast – certainly a theatrical event it deserves more attention than it has received so far!

The Day They Banned Christmas is on at the Courtyard Theatre until November the 9th.

Top image: Muireann Ryan in The Day They Banned Christmas at the Courtyard Theatre. Photo by Cameron McNee.

Bottom image: Lowell Baricanosa in The Day They Banned Christmas at the Courtyard Theatre. Photo by Cameron McNee.

Ian Mairs, who played Moritz Stiefel, has to serve as the pars pro toto here. His memory of being 14 manifested itself on stage in a lot of huffing and puffing, and an unnervingly high-pitched voice. Most of the other actors (Natalie Christopher, Russell Anthony, Jack Burns, Casey O’Connor) had similar problems with the youthful male crowd, making it difficult to differentiate between them. Only Leon Wander as Melchior Gabor was more convincing, because he didn’t opt for impressions of childlike behaviour, but correctly located the essence of being young in the overabundance of energy only partly restrained. The female characters tended to be more successful overall. Sophie Caruana as Martha Bessel, and especially Niesha Dell as Wendla Bergmann, seemed to be more in tune with their younger selves; I began to wonder if the ability to preserve one’s ‘inner child’ is not a female quality.

Suffice it to say that the acting as a whole did not convince me. This was exacerbated by the fact that Garrett chose to ignore Wedekind’s heightened language, and instead approached the play like a ‘kitchen sink drama’. There was no build-up of tension, neither in the scene where Wendla is beaten, nor when she has sex with Melchior. The imaginative faculty did not come into play. The only delightful exception was Ilsa’s (Dervla Toal) role as a fairy-like creature, who was able to conjure a sense with nature with a long green sash and a piece of red velvet.

If Spring Awakening were a painting, it would resemble the works of German Expressionists such as Emil Nolde or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. This production was more like Biedermeier naturalism. This was especially noticeable towards the end, where Wedekind turns to the surreal for good. But instead of showing the beheaded Moritz as per the stage direction in the play, we are presented with the feeble solution of a whitened face and a tiny red hole where the bullet had entered Moritz’ head. Disappointing. And the mysterious Black Man, rescuer and father-figure, played by Wedekind himself in the original first production, here deteriorated into a mundane and pompously fool strutting about with a Venetian mask.

The production had its moments, such as the extremely funny masturbation scene. Or the incredible subversion of authority in the teachers’ conference scene where the headmaster was enthroned up high, with a table in the form of a piece of cloth extending down from him to the other teachers. It created a three-dimensional tableau full of fascinating spatial dynamics. Moreover, this was the only scene when the actors’ age felt right. But unfortunately, over the three hours, these moments were too few to salvage the night from the dregs of cliché. This piece of fringe theatre, revealed itself to be far more conventional than the ‘mainstream’, but with far less skilful acting.