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Brixton House’s Christmas show is a spirited but muddled riff on the Cinderella story that feels caught between the larky irreverence of a panto and something more akin to a teen high-school drama.
Sindi-Ella (Yanexi Enriquez) lives above her late dad’s greengrocers, which is now owned by her stepmum Steph (Julene Robinson). In a change from fairy-tale tradition, Sindi-Ella is in no way mistreated, though she certainly chafes at her new family, notably her shrill, wannabe-influencer step-sister Tia (Jesse Bateson).
With the shop losing money and Tia frantically lobbying her mum to move them back to west London, the outlook looks bleak for Sindi, who just wants to keep the shop running as a tribute to her late parents. But then matters are confused – on almost every level – by the arrival of Flip Flop, a vastly successful, teens-only social media company looking to move into Brixton, with its young CEO Charmz (Alex Thomas-Smith) having just started at the step sisters’ school.
What ensues is… pretty bizarre: Danusia Samal’s script absolutely cannot make its mind up what it thinks about gentrification, and whether Charmz is a love interest, villain or kooky BFF. The ultimate message seems to be ‘capricious tech billionaires are okay so long as they have friends to help them gentrify nicely’, which is fine and probably quite pragmatic, but this stuff might have landed better if Samal and the creative team had been either gone for full panto-knockabout tone, or just abandoned holiday vibes completely and really got into the weeds of gentrification in Brixton. As it is, it occupies a strange hinterland where on the one hand Sindi is a genuinely intense pretty intense, angst-ridden character, haunted by her dad’s death, and on the other Ray Emmet Brown plays a magical talking plant that seems to turn into her dad later on.
Still, big-ish name director Ola Ince does a nice job of keeping everything light and lively. There’s an absolutely ravishing, multi-level set from Amelia Jane Hankin that really ups the production’s sense of stature. The grimy pop songs from Duramaney Kamara are an agreeable flourish. And the cast give committed performances: maybe it would have worked better if it had been sillier, but they really go for it with the whole ‘CBBC teen soap’ vibes. Kind of confused, but basically good fun, and certainly different to your run-of-the-mill ‘Cinderella’.