The Stratford East panto is truly London’s most mercurial seasonal event: a policy of switching the playwright every year (but always hanging onto gifted composer Robert Hyman) has resulted in some wild concepts: last year’s ’Cinderella’ baffled everyone by relocating the action to Ancient Egypt.
TV writer Anna Jordan returns to her theatre roots for this year’s ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, and plays it pretty safe… which is probably for the best.
Here, Jack and his family live in the town of Splatford, a community built on the trade of its precious healing mud. Unfortunately, the Giant who lives in the clouds above demands a tithe of half of their mud and a lot of their rent – as collected by his dastardly winged bailiff Flesh Creep (Lucy Frederick) and her simpering, pampered son Junior (Billy Lynch).
Jordan and director Denzel Westley-Sanderson offer a spirited but – mud trade excepted – generic spin on the classic story, that feels like a corrective to last year’s excesses, but also reminds you why it’s actually nice to do something a bit different.
Nathan Kiley goes through the daming motions competently, although without quite the presence of a true great. Savanna Jeffrey is nice as Winnie the Moo, Jack’s affable, McDonald’s-loving talking cow. The funnest character is definitely Lynch’s Junior, a sort of camp, befuddled Victorian schoolboy who has somehow ended up as sidekick to his villainous mum, and is hysterically out of his depth.
A trippy sequence in which Nikhil Singh Raj’s affable Jack loses his mind as he climbs the beanstalk is another dollop of fun. If the show could really have done with a few more moments where it just goes nuts, it’s a decent effort from Jordan, and elevated as ever by the versatile Hyman: his songs this year range from a decent lovers rock knock off, to a song about being a villain stitched together from famous Hollywood villain themes.
It suffered two major technical glitches when I saw it, which I’d call pretty unacceptable for any show four days after press night. But you can forgive a lot with panto, and the breakdowns added an agreeable note of randomness to what’s shaping up to be a fairly safe panto season.