REVIEW: Jack and the Beanstalk – Eastwood Park Theatre, Giffnock
Eastwood Park excel at producing family-friendly traditional pantos with plenty of fun and frolics for every age group. This year’s offering Jack and the Beanstalk is the usual barmy take on the traditional tale.
Most of the familiar and some less familiar characters are here: there’s Jack and his mum Dame Trott, Jack’s brother Silly Billy, a King, and a Princess called Boo. The magic beans also appear and a scene stealing cow with attitude (and some fabulous dance moves). The baddies are also here to boo and hiss, including a child-eating giant and his henchman Fleshcreep. The baddie managing to be bad enough to elicit some screams of hysteria from the traumatised tinies. That said, the peril is mild enough that all but the very smallest should cope with it.
Where the panto excels is in the audience interactions: there are dances to learn, shout outs and call backs, water guns, mayhem through the auditorium and some custard pie slapstick. In these moments the panto’s target audience really gets invested. However, it must be said there are rather too many moments outside of this when the action flags. There are too many moments of unnecessary filler and long sequences of dad jokes and outdated references that would go over the head of most of the adults much less the kiddies, resulting in a running time of over two hours (proving in many cases to be challenging for the child audience).
There are a few more problematic issues (a fairy whose diction is so bad it’s almost impossible to decipher what she’s saying), but the biggest problem is how a pantomime in 2024 decides to keep in a sequence that allows Jack’s prize for defeating the giant, to be getting the girl. Spiller’s Pantomimes, you really can do better. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to ensure the usual happy ending – it just needs to be more 2024 appropriate. These straight off the shelf pantos (and the companies who own them) need their local directors to have a bit more autonomy to trim and edit where appropriate to their specific audience.
Last year’s offering was a hard act to follow and so it has proved, but there’s a lot to like here, especially Silly Billy who is the stand-out among the cast. Providing the lion’s share of the laughs and rallying and keeping the audience when he’s on stage. It is still a wholesome few hours of entertainment and a perfect introduction to traditional panto, but it needs a bit of trimming and a little modernising to keep the audience fully on side throughout.
Eastwood Park is always worth a visit to get your festive season off to a sparkling start.
Runs until 31st December at various times (tickets are selling fast but can be found at Jack and the Beanstalk Pantomime – East Renfrewshire Culture & Leisure )
