Review: Laughs all the way for popular panto

Jack and the Beanstalk
by Roger Hall
Directed by Stuart Devenie
Napier Municipal Theatre,
August 9-13
Reviewed by Amanda Jackson
Stuart Devenie has stuck to the conventions of pantomime in most respects in his direction of Roger Hall's play.
The result was slapstick, one-liners, singing and silliness that evoked traditional audience participation, lots of laughs and snickers and an element of bewilderment as the full force of the genre unfolded.
Dialogue and pun abounded in the costume and the set, enriching a script that tells the well known story of Jack and the Beanstalk with quite a lot of extra bits.
Expecting the unexpected was just as useful an approach as being ready for the ever-so-British type of raucous carry on and the parochial wit. There are many characters and events which are historically woven into pantomime and we were given a full complement.
The obligatory animal was a wonderful cow whose costume was a work of art, played empathetically by Caroline Hickman, who also played a goose with a fabulous accent.
Jack's mother, as convention has it, is usually played by a man in drag, in this instance an entertaining Jonathan Krebs, who worked hard at warming up a mixed audience of children and adults and who handled the slapstick and the singing with ease.
The villain in two guises was a glittering example of the skills of Gillian Davies' acting and Jack, the innocent and hapless lad at the centre of the story, was endearingly interpreted by William Atkin.
Opposite him, Amy Barnard played Paris Stilton and sang a lovely couple of jazz numbers, and William Winitana delighted the audience with his lightness of foot and beauty of voice.
As Claude Back, the usually chatty John Cocking was a silent Marcel Marceau character and a gorgeous harp.
This was a frenetic show for a stage manager to choreograph and Dominic Coyle showed his managing technique early on as a surprise, all adding to the oddities and interest of one of the oldest forms of theatre there is.
Sally Rutgers played the piano throughout, as accompaniment and incidental interludes, and her talent is undeniable but there was room for more instruments to round out the sound to fill the venue.
Visually, the show is a feast of eccentricity and cleverness and an incredibly talented team of local artists and designers have some amazing pieces of work on stage as costumes and set pieces, backdrops and props.
There is great attention to detail and extras which added another dimension to the humour just simply by being there, but there were times when the venue just seemed too big for what was going on, and the cast too small to maintain the kind of frenetic energy and engagement that was required to propel one scene into the next.
Certain scenes frayed a little to messiness in these early stages of the season, possibly construed as fresh interpretations of an organic script, but nevertheless, forays into the audience weren't as exciting for us as for the actors.
That said, this is a seldom seen theatrical form and it is there for the taking in terms of enjoyment and we are lucky to have a chance to see pantomime at all these days, let alone one which is flecked with so many well known local identities and brought to us by such icons in theatre as Stuart Devenie and Roger Hall.