Mud, glorious mud … Splatford is full of it, and it’s got healing properties. But Giant Belch is stealing this cruddy elixir, and ratcheting up the rent on Milky Linda’s dairy, too. Such is the backdrop to this Christmas fare at Stratford East – and it’s as flimsy a backdrop as you’d expect in a panto. The mud motif is soon forgotten, as that familiar tale takes centre-stage of gullible Jack, his beloved bovine Winnie, and some grand larceny perpetrated against an ogre in the clouds.
The writer is Anna Jordan, sometimes of Killing Eve and Succession. She brings droll touches (“Me and that beanstalk,” cries our glamorous dame, “we’re an up-skirter’s dream!”), but this is a trad not a rad take. There’s no love interest: that’s a departure. But the show does little that’s new with the fairytale, nor anything interesting with its giant in the sky, whose threat evaporates on contact with some soppy words from Jack about learning to love oneself.
It’s fun, though. More at the RuPaul than the Roy Barraclough end of the dame scale, Nathan Kiley puts in a fine shift as Linda, whether bedecked in recycled crisp bags or an eye-catching coffee-cup frock (costumes by Lily Arnold). Lucy Frederick has fun as the giant’s mouthy London henchwoman Flesh Creep, as does Billy Lynch as her simpering son. Nikhil Singh Rai’s Jack makes a less vivid impression; one rather wonders why Winnie the Moo (sparkling Savanna Jeffrey) is so attached to her owner.
A slapstick sequence involving almond milkshakes fell flat when I attended, and with one member of an already small ensemble missing through illness, some other sequences also wanted for oomph. But there are enough catchy songs by Robert Hyman, and spirit in the script and performances, to amount to, well, a hill of beans at least, if not a cloud-capped one.
• At Theatre Royal Stratford East until 6 January
