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Like most pantos, the Lyric Hammersmith’s ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ sends you reeling out into the wintry darkness with a mix of warm Christmassy glow and slightly shellshocked WTF-just-happened bafflement. But playwright Joel Horwood’s decidedly offbeat, determinedly left-wing take on poses some slightly more interesting questions than ‘Why am I humming that Little Mix song I spent all year trying to avoid?’
Horwood’s reworked the traditional fairy story to give it a kind of kid-friendly anti-gentrification message. A gender-swapped Jack and her mum are struggling to pay rent to their malevolent landlord Fleshcreep. Vikki Stone is magnificent as Fleshcreep, dragged up in a glitter moustache and accompanying her demands for money with surreal woodwind solos. But her campy antics also satirise housing crisis-era logic: when Jack says she’s managed to grow carrots on the farm, Fleshcreep seizes on this creative activity as an excuse to hike up the rent. Daisy the Cow (the very funny Kayla Meikle) hates being milked and is reluctantly exploited for money by her impoverished owners (is Horwood a card-carrying Peta member?).
‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ is co-directed by the unlikely, impressive pairing of Lyric boss Sean Holmes and Jude Christian, directors usually more at home at the Royal Court than fairyland. They create an atmosphere that’s both noisily and quietly subversive. Jack’s a girl, Jill’s a boy and Dame Lotte Trottalot (Kraig Thornber) is rather more motherly and kid-friendly than your average panto dame. She unleashes an endless stream of plant-based puns that deftly avoid the more innuendo-beset members of the vegetable patch.
In case I’ve made it sound like it’s all a bit worthy, let it be known that there are also two singalongs, abundant sweets scattered to the audience, and even real(ish) snow falling from the sky. Magical and puzzling in all the right ways.