It's behind us... Oh no it isn't
The Sunday before Christmas Eve finds us in sunny Catford, at the Broadway Theatre, for a very Lewisham (‘Lewish Farm) Labour Jack and the Beanstalk, written and directed by Susie Mckenna.
With no (very minor) stars of TV, but instead a perfectly respectable rep style cast (with added children), this is very slightly topical (the villain is Boris the Lying Cockroach, played well by Ben Fox) and very slightly woke (the chief positive protagonist is a Queen Bee desperate to save Lewish Farm from spoliation by the Giant’s proposed gold mining aspirations).
‘Proper’ pantomimes like this are made or broken by the Dame, and Derek Elroy makes a fine one, let down perhaps by quite pedestrian costumes (for the part) and with no Transformation stunner.
We get a (weak) slapstick episode, community song (quite late in the day) and sweets thrown to the front rows, together with a somewhat limp audience participation moment.
We get a quite complex script and a few innuendos that could have been dropped or muted for a Sunday Matinee.
We even get messages from and about the audience read out. This is, as I noted, a proper pantomime – well performed and sung (Siobhan Athwal - Queen Bee and Grace Moorhouse - Goldiniah -The Hen - have particularly strong and true voices). And the Giant is a coup-de-theatre very well performed by, I’m guessing, four cast members, two of them the athletes who also gave us a winning Caroline the Cow.
All told (despite the politics, which I’m never sure add much to a children’s pantomime once going passed traditional anti-government satire – the issues of climate change may be known to local children, but are not a constant source of amusement, I’m guessing) this is what a local pantomime should be. And was.