JACK AND THE BEANSTALK Theatre Royal, York to 2 February.
York
JACK AND THE BEANSTALK
by Berwick Kaler
Theatre Royal To 2 February 2002
Runs anything up to 2hr 45min One interval
TICKETS 01904 623568
Review Timothy Ramsden 24 December
Panto time is party time with Kaler's comic carnival.Never mind the stars – the band receives a lusty hand. With audiences returning for anything up to their twentieth annual dose, this pantomime is so traditional it's post-modern.
Thousands flock every Christmas, even if many never trouble theatres in between. The cheers grow louder as each favourite appears, right up to the roof-raising shouts of joy when Kaler's dame makes a fantastic appearance – this year flying in horizontally with the familiar greeting, 'Me babbies, me bairns.' And children we'd better all become for the duration, throwing off inhibitions.
Kaler takes up a fair amount of time tormenting principal girl Suzy Cooper, who dared to have to have a panto off last season ('Are you staying for the run or just the one show?'). Loads of time is spent discussing the audience's main interest – the show itself. Regular villain David Leonard threatens if he doesn't win this year he won't be back next. Fair enough, but going by Cooper's fate, it'll be his funeral if he returns in 2003. Not that he ought to complain; at least this year he's managed to delay his entrance till after Kaler's flying Fanny Shufflebotham.
The slapstick may not be especially witty or athletic, but never mind so long as Martin Barrass is covered in enough colourful goo. Whatever Jack-the-Lad character he's playing he can't escape Berwick's time-bomb, 'You're a middle-aged man'. There again, some angelic child-dancer has just answered Kaler's rebuke about speaking to his supposedly 59 year old self with, 'You're 61.'
Deconstruction becomes literal during the milking of a cow with particularly distended udder. Berwick pushes Barrass up between the two cow actors and drags one of them out for a chat – almost talking the hind legs off a donkey. And there's the meta-theatre comment on the actor-audience relationship - we never you for granted, he claims.
We believe him. He is a great clown, subversive of all pretension. Every political summit should be proceeded by a Kaler show – surely, even hardened politicos would find it next to impossible to talk the confrontational tripe so many do afterwards.
2002-01-22 15:17:20