One day, a panto may come along in which the story is given as much (OK, even half as much) attention as the dame’s frocks, and where the romance between the principal boy and his sweetheart isn’t as flat as the backcloth. Hackney’s Dick Whittington is not that panto. Nope, this is the one wot Clive Rowe is in, the one wot London’s most celebrated dame now conceives and directs, indeed.
Rowe is the king/queen of all he surveys here, lording it over rat-infested London, a ship on the high seas and then – for no apparent reason – a desert island populated by moneyed beatniks. (You expect pop songs in a panto; blissed-out Beatles album track Sun King, not so much.)
That’s all quite sufficient to keep this panto ship afloat, notwithstanding the best efforts of Graham MacDuff’s ZZ Top-alike King Rat to sink our heroes five fathoms deep in Act Two. There’s lively crowd-work, with Rowe tormenting a hapless dad in the stalls. There are pert set-pieces, such as the slapstick number that finds his dame Sarah the Cook repeatedly removing the trousers of a fellow sailor. Those frocks (costumes by Cleo Pettitt) do not disappoint, with Rowe appearing variously as a cash register, a pepper shaker (“I got it on Grindr”) and a cruise liner, cabin lights a-twinkling, as Rowe’s eyes do throughout.
The kids will be happy. My middle one strained for a hurled sweetie, my youngest cowered from the rats, my eldest boasted of working out early doors who the baddie was. One might wish, but wish in vain, for other performances capable of wresting the limelight from Rowe. Plucky and wholesome Kandaka Moore’s hero may be, but to say that Dick and Alice’s romance is phoned in would be an insult to telecommunications. Another Hackney stalwart, Kat B, has some fun as Dick’s magic moggy, and there’s no doubting the joyful ensemble spirit as the show – pest control easily restored – dissolves into song and dance at the end. As pantos go, it’s not paved in gold – but now and then, it sparkles.
At Hackney Empire, London, until 5 January
