They call the Palladium Christmas pantomime “the glitziest show in town”, which basically means “most expensive”. I feel moved to point out that I wasn’t paying; I went with my friend, who is a theatre critic. It’s anyone’s guess which sounds the most boastful: “I’m so well-connected, I get to go to a panto for free” or “I’m so incredibly rich I could blow 200 quid on a theatre ticket”. Let’s say they are both as bad as each other.
It was Robin Hood, starring Jane McDonald, Julian Clary and Nigel Havers, but the first convention of panto is that the story doesn’t really exist. They’re looking to create a spectacle that reminds you a bit of a dream you once had about the story. If ever there is anything on the stage and you can’t for the life of you figure out the point of it – an incredibly long and repetitive song, for instance, in which people nearly hit each other in the face with blunt objects – it’s because there is a convention. Person shamed in the audience, typically for being bald? Call-and-response demands from the audience? A sudden shower of delicious sweets, probably Freddos? These are the building blocks of the form, which is the only one the English have ever invented, said my friend. I said: “What about … ?” and he said: “Don’t say morris dancing”, and I was actually going to say cockfighting, but only because I had already been overexposed to Clary and Havers.
So that was Thursday. On Sunday I went to Jack and the Beanstalk: What a Whopper!, and they call that the “adult panto”, because if you call it the gay panto everyone says: “Aren’t all pantos gay?” It’s the latest show by Jon Bradfield and Martin Hooper, and the thing that makes it adult isn’t, by any stretch, sexual innuendo. All pantos are like that. You can tell it’s for adults because it’s actually funny.
No shade, there, on the Palladium’s Robin Hood: the combined funny bones of the cast would make it incredibly churlish not to laugh, just at the sight of them walking about. But more striking still were the production values. A giant dragon was superseded by an even larger dinosaur, for a reason I didn’t even understand at the time, let alone would be able to describe now. At one point, Clary appears in a lifesize (I think) fire engine that floats in the air, for a single-line gag that, again, I didn’t completely get (something to do with his hose?). It was a spectacle, all right, but two lines of working joke would have delivered a bigger laugh, as Jack and the Beanstalk’s crowd could attest.
I started to fixate on how much Robin Hood must have cost. At one point, two stick men – one who looked like Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy, one who looked straight out of Game of Thrones – ambled on and off, and the sheer craftsmanship that had gone into them only added to the bafflement of what they were doing there at all. It was like watching a drunk person capering around a street with £20 notes spilling out of their pocket – which is to say, quite funny, but shouldn’t one of their mates put them in a cab? There’s another panto convention for the finale: that they need a showstopper costume change, because otherwise – having dispensed with the formality of a sense-making plot – how would you know when to clap. But here, there must have been 50 people on stage in spectacular, semi-neon Lurex. I can’t see that they’d have got change from £20,000. For the Jack and the Beanstalk finale, meanwhile, yes, there were sequins; but sprinkle on some neat choreography and sharp dialogue that made sense, and the sequins didn’t have to be made of pure gold.
I ended up with an unfamiliar sense of peace. Amid all the shonky Santa’s grottos, and misfire Christmas theme parks with four grumpy reindeer and some squash, this is one festive tradition in which no one’s getting ripped off: Jack and the Beanstalk is genuinely good. And every penny spent on Robin Hood tickets they have definitely already blown on the set, the costumes, the cast, etc. That said, comparisons are odious. If you’re an adult who is big into panto, you should see both.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
