Reviews / Hurrah – panto is back!
Our reviewer Kathy Hubbard thoroughly enjoyed a ‘rambunctious and cheerfully anarchic’ production of the panto classic ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, which had its opening night on Tuesday
CAST your mind back to this time last year, when we were facing a second Christmas under Covid restrictions. Event cancellations abounded and we just had to grin (weakly) and bear it. Fast forward twelve months and a hugely excited crowd is converging on the Garrison…panto is back, and the audience can’t wait to engage with it.
And there was plenty for folk to be excited about with Open Door’s Jack and the Beanstalk, written and directed by Barnum Smith.
The engagement began immediately with Auld Jack (Ruth Archer) inviting the audience to listen to the tale of his youthful adventure with a very scary giant, quickly followed by a beaming cast delivering a joyful opening chorus number that positively radiated a We’re here! And it’s great to be here! greeting. Panto was back.
The setting is [insert local reference], and no, that is not a typesetting error, that really is the name of the village – a good introduction to Barnum’s sly humour, a hallmark of his gratifyingly witty script.
The villagers are finding the times hard, not least because of the tyranny of their avaricious laird, Jacob Sleaze-Dogg, played with obvious relish by John Haswell.
Times are hard for Ma Raeburn too (Bob Lowes) so she sends her feckless younger son Jack (an exuberant performance by Nicola Fleck) to sell the family cow (or, “my cow, Pat” – geddit?). Jack is swindled into exchanging Pat for a huge bean, and in the face of his mother’s wrath, he plants it…the rest is panto legend, as Jack climbs the emerging beanstalk into the land of a villainous giant, followed by his cat, some bungling swindlers and eventually, by the laird himself.
The audience was expecting all the hallmarks of the genre that they love, and Barnum delivered them in spades, from Ma Raeburn’s opening speech, a bravura litany of ever-worsening tractor puns, to chases around the auditorium, ‘Oh yes he did/oh no he didn’t!’ episodes, slapstick sequences, plenty of opportunities for booing the villain, some “he’s BEHIND YOU!’ moments and everything else that no panto worth its name can afford to be without, including some groan-inducing visual gags (Amelia Boyes’ Carrier Pigeon, to name but one).
Open Door boasts some very seasoned panto actors and they were all on top form – Ian Souter as Gogmagog the Giant (heroically navigating his way across the stage in some unfeasibly huge platform boots), Kevin Briggs and Molly Williams as the hapless would-be swindlers the Knox brothers, Hannah Whiley as Simon, the favoured son, and Malcolm Younger as the pompous, bumbling detective, D.I. Why.
The other cast members rose to the occasion with energy and commitment, and the ensemble pieces were full of life (the youngest cast member, Willow Boyes, eliciting ecstatic sighs from the audience every time she came on stage).
With a cast of over thirty and limited column space it is impossible to name check them all, but I can categorically say that every one of them gave it everything they’d got – and the audience loved them for it.
The central relationship of Jack and his cat Jill (played with seemingly effortless physicality and grace by Celestine Verdcourt Lawrence) never once lost energy or pace, My Cow Pat was cheered enthusiastically at her every appearance and John Haswell was so convincing in his impersonation of a certain well-known Conservative MP that he frankly started to worry me…
This was the company’s opening night, and thus prone to the challenges faced by all panto opening nights – some missed cues, some frantic set changes that take longer than they might, etc, but that will all resolve as the run continues, and the backstage crew and technicians should be congratulated on some smashing, performance-enhancing effects.
The musicians, led and directed by Carol Jamieson, are all very experienced in their craft and as note-perfect as we have come to expect. The set was designed for fun and ease of movement, and the costumes had the skill, playfulness and imagination of Izzy Swanson written all over them.
My only reservation was that the pace of the second half began to falter as the plot went for a wonder around of its own for a while – but it was the opening night and it is panto: the plots often take on a life of their own.
Barnum Smith, who recently graduated with a master’s degree in film, should be very proud of his achievement with this production.
He tells me he was daunted by the fairly seismic shift from working with a tightly knit film crew to giving direction to such a large cast and crew, and with typical modesty he said that he had been “privileged” to have the support of experienced theatre practitioners like Izzy Swanson and John Haswell in this, his debut as a theatre director.
I hope he carries on writing for the stage too. He and the Open Door company have put together a clever, rambunctious and cheerfully anarchic production that had the audience firmly on its side throughout, and which radiated all the warmth and joy that live theatre can offer.
Jack and the Beanstalk is on at The Garrison until 17 December. There are still some tickets available via the Shetland Arts box office.
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