Pinocchio review, Shakespeare’s Globe – Full of heart, this well-worn tale is anything but wooden

’Tis the season when a family trip to the theatre means being assaulted by frenzied pop numbers, dazzled by lurid costumes, and bombarded with sweets hurled through the air. That is happily not the case at Shakespeare’s Globe, whose venerable wooden “O” houses a rather more wholesome kind of show this Christmas. “If this lot wanted fun, they’d be across the river at the Palladium,” says roguish showman Franzine, ribbing the high-minded families at this classy outdoor take on Pinocchio.

The playwright Charlie Josephine has adapted Carlo Collodi's strange, sanctimonious 1883 novel into a quaintly rustic musical that feels a million miles away from both Disney’s version and from anything else you’ll see on stage right now. It uses this story of a wooden puppet to explore what it means to be human, and to be loved – and ends up pulling the heartstrings of everyone in the audience.

One of the many joys of Globe regular Sean Holmes’s production is the way that he lets this Shakespeare-saturated space lend a Renaissance flavour to the story. We’re in a small Italian town where everyone cavorts about in doublets and ornate collars, proclaiming things to be “bellissimo” and “fantastico”, while eagerly awaiting the annual puppet performance of Romeo and Juliet. Then, rebellious local oddball Geppetto (Nick Holder) carves a puppet of his own and gives everyone a new, rather more chaotic kind of entertainment. As the voice of wooden boy Pinocchio, Lee Braithwaite is full of pre-teen curiosity and clumsiness, roaring with delight as he charges up and down the stage on his new legs.

Soon, he’s infuriating the local policeman, setting fire to the kitchen, and even crashing onto the stage at the theatre to save his imperilled puppet brethren. Holder invests Geppetto with all the tenderly bewildered exasperation of a new parent, finding his feet as the wooden son he created stumbles haphazardly through this precise Italian town.

These early scenes do feel a little stodgy, especially because this production does surprisingly little to extend a warm, interactive welcome to a young audience who are sat or stood out in the cold for two hours. But things soon heat up when Pinocchio falls into the company of a host of wonderfully drawn weirdos. Steven Webb is a standout as vibrating green moral adviser Cricket, while Lucy McCormick and Kerry Frampton are horribly unsettling as Cat and Fox, the tricksters bent on stealing his precious gold coins.

Proceedings are further enlivened by Josephine and composer Jim Fortune’s songs, which span footstomping Renaissance bops, dark bluesy numbers, and rabble-rousing rock’n’roll. Arguably, these inventive musical numbers are held back both by overly convoluted lyrics and by energetic choreography that doesn’t let the actors’ voices blend and achieve full force.

But what really does sing is Josephine’s handling of this story’s emotional heart. In the original tale, Pinocchio’s nose grows because he tells fibs to the Blue Fairy. Here, that moment is less about lying – and more about this boy learning how to express how much he loves his devoted puppeteer father, and how to be loved in turn. If the audience, outside in the cold in mid-December, had frozen to their seats, you could feel the iciness collectively melting away at this rare, unvarnished moment of vulnerability – definitely not something you’d find in the stuffier, showier playhouses across the Thames.

On at Shakespeare’s Globe until 4 January