Kate Wyver

Pantos have so much crossover with queer performance, it always feels odd that most mainstream productions act straight. London’s biggest queer panto Jack and the Beanstalk: What a Whopper! helps redress this imbalance, with enough dick jokes to butt you into the new year. Created by the team behind the previous pantos at the now sadly shuttered LGBTQ+ venue Above the Stag and now in its second year at the Charing Cross Theatre, this gay adult affair has a stellar dame, but the energetic cast are restrained – not in a sexy way – by a disappointingly droopy script.   Writers Jon Bradfield and Martin Hooper – who wrote the ATS pantos for over a decade – thrust us into the rolling hills of Upper Bottom in the Yorkshire Dales. Under the cock-like clouds of David Shields’s glittering set, our randy protagonist Jack (Keanu Adolphis Johnson) is attempting to make it as a farmer in his wellies and tiny thigh-busting denim shorts. In swoops closeted Reverend Tim (Joe Grundy) for a quick fumble in the graveyard (‘Forgive me father’, they sing between the headstones, ‘for I have rimmed’). As light sexual shenanigans ensue and a cute cow (who sweetly gets her own bio in the programme) is swapped for a handful of magic beans, textbook evil villain Lady Fleshcreep (a swaggering Jordan Stamatiadis) stomps around town, trying to ruin Jack’s fortunes and steal everyone’s land.   All pantos work to a formula, but the best carve out their own identity. Beyond finding a hundred words for arsehol

Step into Zara's kitchen and you'll be put to work, a knife slotted into one hand and an onion in the other. There are people to feed and she’s got enough to worry about.Emteaz Hussain’s anxious, sometimes heavy-handed domestic drama frames a clash between two estranged sisters. Yasmin (Lena Kaur, a sharpness in her gaze) is trying to close the distance between them, while Zara (Avita Jay, her care cloaked by fear) is deliberately pushing her sibling further away. But when Yasmin lets herself in, dumps her bags on the counter and puts the kettle on, Zara’s avoidance tactics quickly fall apart. A sober discussion of Islamophobia and misogyny, Expendable is told through the lens of a fraught family desperately trying to hold itself together in the face of crisis: Zara's son Raheel (a morose Gurjeet Singh) has been falsely accused of being part of a grooming gang, his face splashed across the front page of the paper as one of ‘The Forestdale Ten’. Tempers are on a short fuse. Under Esther Richardson’s direction, everyone is on the edge of snapping right from the start. Nerves remain high throughout, missing out on moments of softness and leaving little space for tension to ramp up when more bombshells drop from victim Jade (energetic Maya Bartley O’Dea) and Zara’s earnest activist daughter Sofia (Humera Syed, full of wide-eyed outrage). Most of the action the family responds to is happening offstage; the protests, counter-protests and arrests that hold the men at the centre of a