[title]
You can take Jack out of the panto. But you can’t really take the panto out of Jack.
Peter Glanville’s stage adaptation of the centuries-old fairytale starts out somewhat differently to the typical Christmas spin on the story. Jack (Hannah Akhalu) lives with her Dad (Henry Regan), a gold miner, who is mercilessly exploited by a corporation run by the unseen Mr Big: he’s given a bag of mouldy food a day in exchange for whatever gold he can haul up to the surface.
On the day the last gold is mined, Dad immediately loses his job, and Jack is sent off to flog their beloved cow. But rather than intentionally trade her for a bag of magic beans, Jack is sort of… ambushed by a magic bush that gives her the beans and whisks the cow off to parts unknown.
Okay, it’s not exactly Ken Loach. Indeed, it’s very good-natured, with sprightly songs from Barb Jungr. But at the outset it is relatively sober compared to the average pantomime take: no Dame Trott, no Fleshcreep, and the cow is a video, not two blokes in a furry costume.
But then the beans grow and Jack climbs up the beanstalk to discover… a giant who could have come straight out of a panto, an amusingly Trump-like über-capitalist in a shiny gold suit with a massive blond head, complaining to his robot companion that he doesn’t have enough gold despite it being established that he has literally all the gold. It’s entertaining but very silly, and puts paid to the idea that this might be a more action/adventure-leaning take than usual.
It’s also a lot shorter than a panto, and its target audience of four- to eight-year-olds are profoundly unlikely to feel jaded about the story at this point in their lives. Roman Stefanski’s production is nice and manages to do a lot with just two actors. Designer Laura McEwen’s videos help a lot, adding depth to the world, and Keith Frederick’s unflashy puppets offer a good sense of scale.
So, a nice retelling of a beloved tale, but ultimately, it’s hardly essential – there is no escaping the fact that there’ll be plenty more jolly, family-friendly versions of the same story coming along at Christmas.