Princess Sparkles at Hoots @ Potterrow Review
Ottilie’s turning five, and her parents have hired Princess Sparkles. This was a mistake. Lily Maryon's debut hour casts the audience as the birthday guests and herself as the entertainer who arrives late, mid-breakup and with a hip flask, dispensing party games, bubbles and a quantity of mysterious white powder that is definitely not glitter. What follows is less a story than an hour of watching a woman slowly come apart in a pink dress that won't quite stay on.
Maryon is the real deal. She has the audience eating out of her sequinned hand within minutes, and the crowd participation is the show's engine: people are pulled up, handed props, renamed, and genuinely get involved in a way that feels like a party rather than an ordeal. On the night I saw it, one audience member had clearly pre-gamed the birthday and kept wandering off-script, and Maryon handled every interruption with total grace, folding it back into the bit without ever losing the room or the character.
Her ad libs are sharper than a lot of the written material, which is both a compliment and a problem. Because there's no plot here, which is fine for character comedy, but there's also nothing to hold onto. The breakup is gestured at, the princess is unravelling, and yet there's no real tension pulling us through the hour. Several bits, such as a game of pass the parcel, run well past their natural ending and start to feel like padding rather than escalation, as though the show is killing time.
A tighter forty-five minutes would be a better show than this sixty. Still, it's enormously fun, very funny and extremely sparkly, and Maryon is a performer you'll want to say you saw early. The character is there. The hour isn't yet.
Princess Sparkles is running until August 31st at Hoots at Potterrow at 23:55.
★ ★ ★
Written by Ellora for Theatre and Tonic, August 2026.