Step away from the festive cheer (From Stroud News and Journal)

Step away from the festive cheer

FED UP with the tinsel and all that Christmas cheer? Another side to Christmas will be on show in Cheltenham next week, thanks to Horsley theatre director David Manzi-Fe.

The Night Before Christmas, performed by The Laughing Orange Theatre Company, is a very funny dark comedy that is definitely not suitable for children and promises a welcome antidote to traditional Christmas entertainment.

The play is an hilarious broadside against seasonal sentimentality. However, lurking underneath the ripe language, low-life characterization and depiction of prostitution, black-marketeering and drug-abuse, there lingers a romantic soft centre.

It is Christmas Eve; and a warehouse worker reckons he has discovered a real-life elf breaking into his factory. The comic riff that develops exploits the surreal logic of the set-up for all its worth with the jokes coming thick and fast.

However underneath the vitriol and the recognition that Christmas is a time of rampant capitalism, mindless hedonism and high suicide rates, is a touchingly moral fable about three people in search of love. One of the delights of this drama is that, like the characters in the play, the audience find themselves pulled between cynicism and wanting to believe in a Christmas miracle.

The Night Before Christmas appears at the Cheltenham Everyman's Other Space on December 18, 21, 22, 23, 29 and 30 at 7pm. On the actual night before Christmas, December 24, it shows at 4pm. Tickets, at £7.50, are available from the box office.

The play is also on at Invention Arts in Bath on Tuesday and Wednesday, December 14 and 15 at 8pm.