Scouse Red Riding Hood duo on delivering full-on festive fun

“We’ve got a boss little cast. And the energy in the room is mad,” says Lindzi Germain. “The show is fast and it’s fun and it’s funny, and we get to put our little stamp on it as well.”

I’ve asked the actress to sum up what Royal Court audiences can expect when they come to see The Scouse Red Riding Hood this Christmas – and so far it sounds like they are in for the theatre’s traditional bout of seasonal silliness.

For Germain it’s certainly business as usual. Her Royal Court Christmas show appearances go all the way back to Fred Lawless’ 2009 knockabout comedy Merry Ding Dong (if you don’t count Capital of Culture’s Night Collar), and since then she’s appeared in a roll call of festive treats including Scouse Pacific, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fazakerley, Pharoah ‘Cross the Mersey and the brilliant Scouse Nativity, as well as a slew of the theatre’s raucous adult ‘Scouse’ takes on traditional pantos.

But alongside familiar faces like Drew Schofield, Keddy Sutton and Liam Tobin there are one or two cast members new to the Royal Court Christmas tradition, if not actually the Court itself, including Lydia Morales Scully.

Morales Scully appeared alongside Germain in You’ll Never Walk Alone in 2022, and last year Royal Court regulars might have caught her as Jean in the new musical Vernons Girls. Meanwhile she spent last Christmas as swing at the Everyman, on standby to step in to any number of rock ‘n’ roll panto roles.

Above; Lindzi Germain and Lydia Morales Scully in YNWA with Adam Keast. Photo by Jason Roberts Photography. Top: In rehearsals for Scouse Little Red Riding Hood. Photo by Clara Mbirimi.

“It was completely different – just as festive, just as Christmassy, just as magical. But in a completely different way,” she says. “I got to play with so many different characters, and being able to be thrown on stage and think, ‘oh, I kind of what to try this’. And the adrenaline of doing it and being supported.

“Because that is what the Christmas show is about. If something does go a little bit wrong, they love it anyway.

“But I’d say that experience and that feeling of just going on and thinking, do you know what, I’ll do my best and they’ll love it anyway because it’s Christmas, I very much got that from the Royal Court. In You'll Never Walk Alone and Vernons Girls, the feeling of, everyone’s there for the same thing, to watch incredible theatre, and I think that’s what follows me through.”

Christmas shows haven’t always been in the life of The Arden School of Theatre graduate. She lived in Spain until she was 10, although she does recall staging grand, two-hour solo productions for her mother and grandmother after Christmas lunch.

Still, when she visited English family over the festive season it would involve trips to the Empire and St Helens pantos. And when she moved over here, as she got older, to Royal Court Christmas shows instead, three generations all going to the theatre together.

It’s likely then she would have seen Germain, a core part of the Court’s Christmas family.

Above: Lindzi Germain in The Scouse Dick Whittington. Photo by Jason Roberts Photography.

Talking of family, Christmas is a time for getting together, but working the festive season can be a juggling act.

“It’s part of our lives, part of what we do, that my kids have grown up with,” Germain says. “Prior to this I was doing panto anyway, so for them it’s just the norm to know that I’m always busy around Christmas time. They’re theatre babies and they get it. They’re now 23 and 27, off doing their own thing, and still working within theatre which is amazing.

“They know we’ll get up on Christmas morning and have a great time and then we’ll open presents and I’ll have my dinner and then fall asleep because I’m knackered!”

The big day itself involves everyone piling round to Germain’s parents where “they treat my brother and me like a king and queen! They’ve got a massive couch which can seat six people and Nick and I sit at each end and no one is allowed in the middle because we have so many presents. The kids sit on the floor. My parents sit on the floor!”

Above: Lydia Morales Scully in Vernons Girls. Photo by Jason Roberts Photography.

For Morales Scully, there might be a spot of karaoke. She and her mum are, she reveals, inspired by the late, great Whitney Houston, while her Uncle Pat will get up and give them his Mack the Knife.

Scouse Little Red Riding Hood has the longest run of any Christmas show across Merseyside and, I wonder, how do they keep the momentum and all this seasonal cheer going all the way into mid-January?

“It’s very lucky really to be full of festivity for weeks and weeks on end,” says Morales Scully.

Germain adds: “It’s just good fun, isn’t it? And people go ‘I book for January because we have Christmas, and we’ve still got something to look forward to in the worst month for some people. Which is January when they all get SAD.

“I’m a very firm believer, and I always say this on every single show, when you’ll get some people who go ‘oh we’ll have a laugh on the last night and we’ll all mess about’. And I’m like, no, because people who have booked tickets on the last night have paid exactly the same money as those people on the first night, and they all get exactly the same show.”

The Scouse Red Riding Hood is at Liverpool’s Royal Court from November 8 to January 18. Tickets HERE