Cast:
Slave of the Ring/Genie of the Lamp: Suzanne Shaw
Wishee Washee – Tim Vine
Princess Jasmine – Helena Dowling
Widow Twankey – Graham Hoadley
Aladdin – Gareth Leighton
Abanazar – Jonathan Ellis
Emperor of China – John Pennington
PC Pong – Yo Santhaveesuk
Director: Christopher Dunham
Script: Eric Potts
Choreographer: David Lee
Its that time of year again, folks – when Him Indoors starts
reading the panto listings and digging out the batteries to put in the
glow-in-the-dark wand to wave. Plus we
had to be out the house because the builders are in, destroying the
bathroom. So its off to sunny Richmond,
boys and girls, mums and dads, for an exciting trip to Pantoland! Mind you, sunny Richmond looks increasingly
bleak – there are more empty shops than last year and even the charity shops have put their prices up. We’ve had to come out again today and are
ensconced in the library, where I am tapping away at the laptop and Him Indoors
is sitting opposite me writing Christmas cards and getting glitter all over the
table. He just said to me “I wonder if
this is what it was like for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert?” and I glared at
him and said “I doubt very much that Prince Albert kept interrupting Queen
Victoria by throwing Christmas cards across the table for her to sign while she
was trying to write a panto review”. But
you never know, I suppose, it could have happened. “Did India send us a card
last year, Darling?”
Aanyway, my heart dropped through the floor when I realised
that we were practically the only adults in the entire auditorium – there were
three primary school parties there and the programme sellers were pale and quaking
in their boots. However, we needn’t have
worried – this is Richmond after all, and the little darlings were all
incredibly quiet (and probably incredibly cold – who would send little boys to
school in weather like this in shorts?) and impeccably well behaved and,
perhaps, just kept that little bit too much in check by teachers because there
was NO waving about of glow in the dark novelties, NO screaming and shouting
and demanding to be taken home to watch CBeebees, NO throwing of sweet packets (although
biodegradable cartons of healthy, vitamin-rich juice were handed out in the
interval) and practically NO laughing or shouting out whatsoever, which in
essence put a real damper on the performance.
The script may not really have taken into account of the local
demographic – I doubt very much that primary school children from Richmond have
ever even heard of B&Q, Woolworths or EasyJet; afterwards I heard a snatch
of conversation between one of the little darlings and their grandparents as
they passed what to the uninitiated appeared to be a hairdressers; “Look
Grannie!”, said little Tarquin, “that’s where Mummy gets her eyebrows plucked!”. Him
Indoors pontificated afterwards that it was the lack of adults in the audience
that made it so quiet – there was nobody there to snort at the double
entendres. I did my best, but it was
hard work. There was no “It’s
behiiiiiiiind yooooooou!” sequence and only a very brief burst of “Oh yes it is/Oh no it isn’t” – maybe children
in Richmond wouldn’t have understood that shouting out is actually ALLOWED at
the panto. “Don’t shout, Jocasta, only
common people do that”. We moved to a box very near the stage for the
second half (very exciting for me - the first time I've been in a box. I've been in a cardboard box, but its not quite the same.....) rather reinforcing the Queen Victoria and Prince Albert image –
although perhaps Waldorf and Stadtler might be a more appropriate one. By this time the laughs were coming thin and
slow rather than thick and fast and there was more than a slight air of
desperation about the entire performance – as we were so close I began to see a
slightly haunted look appear in the eyes of a couple of the cast. Mind you, only a couple of the cast were
really trying anyway – I have never seen panto performers work so hard to get
an audience reaction as Tim Vine and Graham Hoadley. There was an awful lot of “phoning in” of
performances by the younger members of the cast. Gareth Leighton’s Aladdin wasn’t wearing any
makeup whatsoever and looked physically as pale as his performance. Jonathan Ellis’s Abanazer wasn’t nearly evil
enough to register beyond the first couple of rows. I grant you that the role of the Chinese
Policeman isn’t exactly on a par with Hamlet as regards possibilities for
character development or motivation but I am sure that Yo Santhaveesuk could
have given it a little more wellie than he did at yesterday’s performance. Rearrange the following words into a well
know phrase or expression: The Going Motions Through. And he can’t sing either.
I don’t know whether to feel sorry for Suzanne Shaw or
not. Although a complete micro-celebrity
(ex member of Hear Say, Dancing on Ice and a bit of Emmerdale and that’s it),
she is headlining in this panto and therefore probably getting paid more than anyone
else in the entire cast. Mind you, she’s
earning it – she has to double both the Slave of the Ring and the Genie of the
Lamp, which I think is really, really cheap of the producers. There are even jokes about why the two Genies
never appear on stage at the same time and why they look the same – which is
just being arrogant about your stinginess. By the end of the performance she was letting the lack of audience reaction get to her big -time; you could see on her face that she really wasn't happy. Perhaps children from Richmond have never watched commercial TV and don't know who she is/was.
Tim Vine works his socks off as WisheeWashee and I felt really sorry for
him yesterday that he wasn’t getting anything like the reaction he deserved
from a theatre full of slightly unnaturally well-behaved children. It was a bit like watching The Stepford Panto
– he even threw in a couple of ad libs for the cast about how difficult it was getting
any kind of reaction out of them. God help
him he even had to have four of them up on the stage – this being Richmond they
were called Mollie, Edwin, Archie and Benjamin – and I bet they were thrilled
to go home afterwards with a plastic carrier bag stamped with the logo of the
production company with a few cheap odds and ends in. “Its called a plastic bag, Archie
darling. Poor people use them. We can give it to the au pair as a Christmas
present”. Graham Hoadley was a fine
Widow Twankey and I would have loved to have seen him spark off a more
appreciative and interactive audience.
Costumes were great and had obviously had money spent on
them, and there were lots of suitably sparkly backcloths (although I did wonder
why The Cave of Wonders had a backdrop which had those pointy Siamese temple towers on
and which looked more like “The King and I – Act one” than anything else). The Palace Garden set was particularly nice –
pale blues and pinks and greys; you could do a lovely Mikado on that.
It all felt slightly sterile because of the lack of audience
response. I hope they get less well-behaved
audiences for the rest of the run.
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