Farmyard fun breezes along

HONK!, George Lawton Hall, Mossley

AH, the perfect little entertainment for the Christmas season... unless, of course, the season is under snow and ice.

Mossley AODS is undeservedly feeling the pinch this week as the terrible weather makes a mockery of audience numbers and of the work they have put into Stiles and Drewe’s award-winning, colourful retelling of the Ugly Duckling story.

Then again the cast has taken a bit of a hammering too, with some cast members swapping round to meet unavoidable educational appointments — this is, if nothing else, a show performed largely by the young.

The National Theatre musical is a curious farmyard beast: bright and breezy, with big emotional themes as if for the very young. But in tone and comedy it is often pitched at older children, perhaps eight and above — not exactly the fairytale age group.

If you haven’t seen it before, the story is modernised and expanded by having Ugly separated from his loving duck-mother Ida and subject to adventures of the cat-avoiding kind.

Along the way he meets flying, RAF-style geese, a homely cat-and-chicken partnership, friendly frogs and a beautiful little swan, whom he saves from entanglement in a fisherman’s line.

All in all it’s a sweet, if overextended, evening, with lots — rather too many — of heavy-handed songs about it being okay to be different and how good it is to be wanted.

Mossley have done a fine job with the set: a farmyard scene has a pond and fields and a starlit backdrop, brightly coloured and lit throughout — though the central pond does tend to dominate proceedings.

Performances are forward and confident: Michael McCaw perhaps overdoes it with the diffident hand-wringing as little Ugly, but is a strong, likeable character and singer, while Sarah Thewlis is great value as his mother.

Mandy Mallinson and Kirsten Hampson are good fun as the chicken and cat partnership, while Tom Holmes steals much of the second half as the philosophising Bullfrog. Gary Jones, as the cat who wants the plump little “duckling” isn’t perhaps as conniving and underhand as he could be.

The production is better and livelier in the second half, with the addition of the frog chorus and other big-scale scenes, and Ugly’s realisation he isn’t a duck after all.