Getting the panto party started with an escape from this torrid year of politics
Dame Maggie Smith was very entertaining the other day, looking back on her career in the company of Gyles Brandreth at the Orange Tree in Richmond, and recalling her winter of discontent playing Peter Pan at the Coliseum in 1973. She remembered the biting cold, an orchestra pit the size of an Olympic pool, and being flown into the scenery by a Spanish stagehand called Manuel – whose idiotically conceived cue was a tap on the shoulder. “It was really abysmal,” she said, to gales of laughter, “and the children were unspeakable.”
Anyone who does panto duty, which begins in earnest this week, deserves, special recognition for public service. If you can entertain the masses day after day in the festive season, you’re halfway to sainthood.
Watching the beasts of the panto jungle in London – Hackney Empire and the Lyric Hammersmith – getting the 2017 party (and their annual rivalry) started, I can’t say I was left mouth agape by never-before-seen theatrical riches, or indeed rare displays of topical wit.
In a Cinderella specially tailored for multi-cultural “Harkney on Lea”, writer and director Susie Mckenna, back at the Empire for her 19th panto, cocks a snook at Brexit, with an Italian Dandini who frets over being deported; and the biggest boo is reserved for a fleeting Donald Trump.
Down in W6, playwright Joel Horwood puts emphasis on the extortionate rent imposed by Jack’s nefarious landlord, Fleshcreep (a wonderfully over-glowering Vikki Stone). Yet it feels as though both creative teams are fleeing to the hills of escapism after a torrid political year – the Theresa May gag-count is low and even Bojo is absent. The reassuring, jaunty, medicinal message seems to be: keep camp and carry on. In Hackney, romantic chemistry might be lacking between Aisha Jawando’s Cinders and Chris Jenkins’s Charming, but Jawando radiates such eye-beaming warmth that you almost need sunblock, and Queen’s Somebody to Love gives Jenkins his moment of uplift too. Darren Hart is a jivingly lithe Buttons in bellhop tunic and patched jeans (the costuming is broadly old-world Harlem meets youth of today). Making their entrance by hot air-balloon and purring over a man in the audience in a sex-pesty fashion that surely won’t be permissible for much longer, Kat B and Tony Whittle are a fright-faced hoot as the Ugly Sisters. Mckenna makes her vixenish mark too as the stepmother, throwing in a snatch of Rose’s Turn from Gypsy for good measure. Bravo across the board.
The Lyric boasts an even greater Victorian playhouse intimacy – although that doesn’t excuse the failure to deliver the visual goods so far as the giant is concerned. A large golden-egglaying goose doesn’t cut it and the gender-bending is insistent to the point of dogmatic (we don’t just get Faith Omole as Jack, we get Daniel Fraser as a grandly mock-thespian Jill). Yet the six principals earn their crust – Kayla Meikle a jolly Daisy the Cow, whose moos can only be translated by the audience. “Everyone has to be believe that the impossible might be possible,” she says. And the same goes for panto happiness – when it comes true, it’s magic. Let the dames begin!