Cementing the Lyric Hammersmith’s place at the top of the London panto pantheon, here’s a wonderfully inventive new take on Jack and the Beanstalk for 2025.
I’ve seen some high-concept pantomimes take a swing and a miss, but returning writer Sonia Jalay and director Nicolai La Barrie are impressively assured as they relocate the bean-centric action to a strict Hammersmith school concealing a sinister secret.
Siblings Jack (Joey James) and Jill (Sienna Widd) are newly enrolled at the ultra strict Fleshcreep Academy, and while John Patridge’s meat-obsessed (he even wears a meat-pattered suit) Fleshcreep bears zero resemblance to the rather scarier Katherine Birbalsingh, it’s not hard to see see the whole enjoyably unruly spectacle as a satire on the fetishisation of ‘strict’ modern schooling.
The imperious grandeur of regular Lyric dame Emmanuel Akwafo is somewhat missed, although replacement Sam Harrison is great fun when he’s allowed off the leash – his best moment is cracking himself up by ad libbing about the Lily Allan album to an audience of bemused primary schoolers. But there’s something fundamentally amusing about the plot point of his Momma Trott being worked in as the flamboyant new Fleshcreep Academy dinner lady, much to the mortification of her kids.
James is nice as socially anxious Jack who communicates with most people via a lairy sock puppet. And in her first named stage role, recent graduate Widd is scene-stealing good as the fearlessly bolshy Jill, a sort of mean girl who has been reprogrammed to aggressively protect nerds. It’s hard to predict an actor’s future off the back of one pantomime performance, but I’d like to see her again.
If anything, it suffers from having such good ideas – and such rigorous commitment to them – that the inherently rushed nature of panto occasionally leaves you feeling there’s an even better comedy about the British education system struggling to get out. It probably would benefit from the extra year of development that it’s not going to get.
That accepted, it’s a riot, and the live fizz of panto is designed to surmount rough edges. It’s pepped up by a wonderfully chosen barrage of pop songs that runs the gamut from ‘Seven Nation Army’ to ‘Espresso’, ‘Formation’ to a version of ‘Pretty Fly for a White Guy’ about Ofsted inspections. There are some great visual gags too, notably Martin, a pupil who was sent to meet the mysterious Giant and ‘has never been the same since’ (he’s played by a plank of wood), while the very late Giant reveal is extremely nice done.
Superbly done as ever, and an object lesson in how London pantomime not only survives with only five plots to choose from, but actively thrives.
