Comedy news: Sammy J and the Forest of Dreams

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Sammy J and Heath McIver’s foul-mouthed puppet show could be touted as Avenue Q’s offensive Australian cousin. With a brigade of excitable press reviews singing its praises and a barely a seat empty at the Leicester Square Theatre in London, it was interesting to judge if a bunch puppets and a skinny Aussie could live up to the hype. And, happily, in the most part it did.

This is a fairytale with a drama degree and a potty mouth, with a plot seemingly based loosely on The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (purposeless hero finds portal to new dimension under his kitchen sink, enters and is transferred to an oppressed feudal neverland, meets a sidekick and decrees to save the day, mainly in song).

Sammy is a smiley, fun guy, launching his way through a variety of risqué camp numbers like a broadway lead. His opening number, the only set in the human world, is a lament to stolen innocence, brilliantly titled ‘Fuck You Disney’.

Touching on Walt’s penchant for Hitler’s brand of fascism, it sets the tone perfectly for the debauchery that is to come. It also highlights the shows reliance on vulgarity, and the complete rejection of sublety.

The show has received almost unanimous praise in the past year, and even those not wholly impressed have noted it its ‘word-of-mouth hit’ properties.

It seems inevitable, as is often the way with cult shows, that it may be nothing more than a well-produced gimmick. However, Sammy’s overegged acting treads the right side of saccharine whilst McIver’s puppetry is truly fantastic.

Probably the biggest compliment you can pay to The Forest of Dreams (in fact to any puppet show) is the genuine affiliation you feel towards the puppets.

Three brilliant and unrelated cutscenes are interspersed in which a depressive pigeon is mocked by another because his wife has left him, or flown the nest if you’ll excuse the pun.

These scenes are so good that you wonder whether the show would work better as a series of sketches. The same can be said about the few occasions where the fourth wall is broken and things seem to go wrong – these are the genuinely innovative comedic moments and you wish Messrs Jay and McIver had called in Paul Whitehouse to tend to the gag reel.

But the main gripe with The Forest of Dreams is the insistence on the not-always-funny buddy-movie plot device between Sammy and Farlo which takes up most of the stage time, leaving the best characters – who include a cocaine-snorting, orange-faced King and a bizarrely sinister tree with a nasty sense of humour – with little time to squeeze the best out of the pseudo-fable.

As the plot develops along clichéd fairytale lines, it climaxes with Sammy leading an animal rebellion against the King.

The results are less Peter Pan and more Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Fun, filthy and, in parts, quite forgetful, this is a Disney parody of immense accomplishment which stays on the right side of shock-value gimmickry. And although perhaps not quite living up to the hype, The Forest of Dreams is still the best puppet show in town.

Jesse Whittock