BWW Reviews: DICK WHITTINGTON AND HIS CAT, St Anne's Church Hall, Wandsworth, January 30 2011

The lighter evenings herald not just the coming spring, but the end of Britain's panto season, a period of winter harvest as important, and as predictable, for theatre as the autumnal harvest is for farming. Like farmers rotating their crops, theatres rotate their pantos, with plenty of good pickings amongst hardy annuals like Aladdin, Babes in the Wood and Cinderella. Before this analogy collapses, I might also point out that panto, like farming, has big industrial concerns cranking out crowd pleasers for the mass market driven by brand name actors, but panto also supports a healthy grassroots movement of not-for-profit enthusiasts doing things the old way - no modifying of their casts with the genes of a David Hasselhoff or a Pamela Anderson.

Over the years, I've seen good and bad panto, sometimes very bad panto indeed, but I've also learned the rules of the game. (i) It's panto - so deal with it. (ii) The audience are part of the show, not merely spectators, and how hard is it to learn the three lines: "Oh yes he is...."; "Hiss....Boo..."; "Behind you!". (iii) Knowing what's going to happen next is not a flaw in the building of dramatic tension, it's a key component of the fun. (iv) (Optional) Take some decent earplugs. Play by the rules and, well, you're not guaranteed a good time, but you're in with a chance.

My panto this year was a farmers' markety affair produced by New Stagers Theatre Club in a church hall, partly illuminated by some very decent lights, but mainly lit up by the energy of the cast and the squealing laughter of the kids offset by the lower-pitched knowing guffaws of their parents. Dick Whittington and his Cat sticks to the story and the conventions of panto and is all the better for it (an X-Factor pastiche shoehorned into Cinderella is not a good idea, as I found out a few years back, nor are references to Eastenders's storylines). Boys play girls' parts and girls play boys' parts, there's an excellent villain in Tom Cane's King Rat, some Carry-Onish innuendo for the mums and dads (okay, maybe just the dads) and a splendid dame in Keith Barnes' Sarah the Cook, dressed by Dame Edna Everage, inspired by Les Dawson. In Paul Johnson's fast-paced script, there's misunderstandings, lots of goodies, one baddie, a few topical gags delivered with perfect timing, a few nicely-done breaches of the fourth wall with ad-libbing and corpsing, mercifully just the four songs and plenty of audience participation of the shouty kind.

The kids loved it, the cast loved it and the fat middle-aged curmudgeon who felt he'd seen it all before and didn't like it much the first time and probably wouldn't be able to think of anything to write in the review? Well, he enjoyed it too - panto's in a Brit's DNA after all. "Oh yes it is..." 

New Stagers Theatre Club are based in Wandsworth, South London and welcome anyone interested in their theatre work. Their next production is David Hare's The Blue Room in May and they will be back with another pantomime next January.