I never played with dolls as a child. I was one of those girls who shunned anything pink and perpetually ‘feminine’ – instead spending hours getting muddy with the neighbourhood boys. My sister, on the other hand, seemed to own every Barbie under the sun. Dolls featured heavily in her room’s furnishings and every day life. So it was with a sense of irony that I went to see Dolls Cabaret at the Trades Hall. This reviewer was going to be hard to win over. I should also mention that my background is musical theatre – let’s not even get into how much these girls were starting with a heavy weight of expectations.

Gaffa tape held the set together, and I think they’d nicked some of my sister’s childhood sheet sets to create the box home for each doll. Within these boxes we glimpsed the antique porcelain doll, the Bratz doll, the Cabbage Patch Doll, the Polly Pocket, Barbie and the accompanist wind-up doll. The show told their stories through songs, skits and sketches, all devised and performed by the group. At times it felt like I was watching a high school drama class at an all-girls school, where the girls played male roles too. Accents came in and out, voices were untrained, and the only laughs came at the expense of great humour – smut jokes became a fall-back for an audience reaction.

The highlight of this show was the songs themselves. There was real potential in the lyrics, harmonies and composition. Obviously influenced by modern musical theatre, they showed promise and would have worked better had they been delivered by a stronger, more experienced cast. The enthusiasm for experimentation was there, but it just wasn’t smooth, smart or sophisticated enough.

From works like this, great shows can grow, and the songs are certainly worthy of a larger audience.