I have a confession to make: despite a (debatably) strong British accent and a UK passport filled with stamps, I never lived in the UK before arriving in St Andrews. For this reason, my only pantomime experience is Blind Mirth’s annual show and the newly annual St Andrews Charity Pantomime—and I wouldn’t have it any other way. The newest installment in the hopefully-long-running series, Jack and the Very Tall Beanstalk, is a delightfully goofy riot through fairyland, with all the panto tropes I’ve come to know and love.
Buster Van Der Geest has been promoted from lowly actor to writer and director, and he uses this newfound power well to craft a wonderfully wacky show. The well-trodden story of Jack and the Beanstalk is embellished with additions of Jack’s family, where we meet the panto dame and some oddly amorous siblings, two hapless tax collectors looking to foreclosure Jack’s house, and the all-important (and chronically late) fairy godmother. The group run through classic panto gags with ease—though the show is just as often stolen by the ramshackle set and props resulting from a budget spent mainly at the pub.
Early on, Hannah Savage sheds her role as the cow’s rear end goes rogue and tries to usurp the show as a new director, causing havoc for the rest of the hour-and-a-half runtime. This backstage havoc is part and parcel of the show—another memorable altercation involves Jack (Sophie Rose Jenkins) being knocked unconscious and replaced by hapless stagehand Aubrey McCance. Amelia Thompson’s work as stagehand is also owed a round of applause—solely due to the laughter elicited when her handiwork kept collapsing in her wake.
Most anticipated of all, however, was the reveal of the beanstalk. My expectations of a paltry lump of card paper peeping feebly from a flowerpot were smashed so hard they may as well have been ground into flour and used to fertilize the ground the beans were grown in. For the beanstalk has its own actor, Charlie MacBeth, who enters in a green suit to gyrate at the audience. The reveal was one of many laugh-out-loud moments, and a testament to the whimsy of the show.
There are a plethora of other memorable moments, but to list them would be to spoil the fun. While tickets are technically sold out, several empty seats remained during my showing, and tickets are being resold at the door starting at 18:55. If you need entertainment on a cold Tuesday night, get down to the Charity Panto: you won’t regret it.
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