Another Hackney triumph? Oh, yes it is!
Aladdin Hackney Empire
There is nothin’ like a dame when that dame is Clive Rowe, back at his alma mater for the first time since 2015. Rowe, made an MBE last year for services to drama (but it should have been for services to eye-popping sartorial ostentation), has, over the years, cultivated a formidable but always chummy prima donna brand that’s the polar opposite of the icy cynic purveyed (equally brilliantly, I might add) by Julian Clary at the Palladium.
Here, in what feels like a homecoming of sorts (this is Hackney’s 20th panto, and the mood is palpably celebratory), his Widow Twankey is commanding but cuddly, cutting but never cruel, camp but always chaste. Rowe can flirt as fruitily as the best of them, but there is not a single piece of smut or a double entendre to prompt giggles from streetwise nine-year-olds. Instead, in an avowedly family-friendly panto that has a heart as big as London itself, you get Paw Patrol skits and a troupe of dancing pandas.
It might be good, clean fun but it’s also mostly terrific. The audience are at the centre from the start. There are water pistols and a pantomime elephant. Spontaneous shouting is encouraged. Written once again by Susie Mckenna, the venue’s veteran director, it’s an anniversary show that also feels like an entrenchment: a triumphant, emphatic embracing of panto’s music hall roots. The banter is firmly of the variety act variety, the format as loyal as the audience. There are even two Dad’s Army-style police officers in short trousers, vainly trying to keep order on the breakaway isle of Ha-ka-ney with plastic truncheons.
Hackney has always made a virtue of keeping things local, and this year’s cast boasts several Hackney panto veterans who know their audience as well as their audience knows them. Tony Timberlake offers great value as a steadfastly villainous Abanazer whose real name may or may not be Jacob Pees Bogg, Kat B is back as a Rasta-style Genie of the Lamp, while Tameka Empson, on secondment from her role as Kim Fox-hubbard in Eastenders, gives Rowe a run for his money as the hoity-toity Empress, sniffily insisting that her princess daughter marry someone rich. Among the newcomers, Alim Jayda is a Snapchat-happy Dishi, while Julie Yammanee gives some spirited backbone to Princess Ling-mai.
Mckenna has offered more satirical, politically aware scripts in the past than she does here. There is a swipe at Brexit – Ha-ka-ney has left the Eastern Union and as a result, everyone is broke – plus the odd reference to Windrush and colonialism. Yet they are scattered as lightly as icing sugar on a Christmas pudding. More usefully, perhaps, she loosely frames the story of Aladdin – played brightly, if a tad blandly, by Gemma Sutton – as one not about acquiring riches to gain happiness, but about doing good to spread happiness. It’s a bit vague, but it sort of works.
The musical routines are a bit forgettable, and the original songs can’t compare with Empson performing Destiny’s Child’s Independent Women, and Rowe and Timberlake crooning to Abba’s Fernando. A carnival dragon makes only a sadly brief appearance, and a scene involving a flying monster lacks spectacle. The script, too, could be a mite slicker and, as ever with Hackney, the show is too damn long.
Still, while panto is a subversive art form, it can also work beautifully as an innocent one. In this most rancorous, bitterly divided of political moments, wholesome feels most welcome.