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Panto season has come early at new Elephant & Castle venue Bold Theatre. But, Christmas lovers be warned: this not-so-traditional mix-up of some of the genre’s classics does little to get you feeling festive.
‘The Foreigners’ Panto’ is in fact only styled to look like a pantomime: behind all the cardboard sets, surface-level cheer and sing-song is a satire about the horrors of Britain’s current immigration system. If it doesn’t sound very merry, that’s because it isn’t.
A company of ‘foreigners’ have decided to put on a show to honour the ‘great, great, country’ of Great Britain. So here we are at a performance of their pantomime which follows heroine Zara (a slightly demented Aliyah Roberts) and her immigrant family as they fight to stay in the totally fictional city of ‘Londom’. Along the way, she has the expected love story with the son of the evil mayor, Lord Villain, and a brawl with a giant (aptly named Giant Bureaucracy - given the theme). But even with all the welcome jabs at the Home Office, and the cast’s promise that their performance will make us ‘fall in love with panto’, Shani Ezrez’s script is overwhelmingly unfunny, awkward and unrehearsed.
Emotion should come when one actor (Ailyah Roberts) receives a deportation letter. Yet, the shouts and wails that follow seem babyish and withdrawn. It is frustrating because you want to get behind it. But poorly sung numbers come from nowhere. The acting is over the top and cringeworthy. Some of Dame Foreign's lines about the things she used to say back home are just downright bizarre. With co-direction from Marianne Badrichani, Sarah Goddard and Shani Ezrez there's certainly a lot of fun and colour, but the overall picture just feels like a splurge of disconnected ideas. We need more focus and less frolicking for it to be a finished product.
Right at the end there is a clever audience sing-along with a tune ‘every foreigner knows by heart’ – the automated response from the UK Visa and Immigration number – but it is all a case of too little too late. Can a show’s heart being in the right place be enough to save it? This time, I don't think so.