Mother Goose
Hackney Empire
Hamlet
Novello
God, I hate the panto season. Especially the reviews. You get some cynical, steely-hearted, acid-flinging critic who takes his two-year-old kid to a Christmas show for the first time and the old bruiser’s heart melts, his brain mushes up and his review reads like the last paragraph of a Mills & Boon novel, all gooey and dribbling with marshmallowy tosh. It’s bloody awful. Mind you, if you’d seen little Isaac at Mother Goose perched on my knee with his friend Leo beside him in his yellow parka with the hood up, your heart would have melted too. What a huggable wuggable pair of idgeable squidgeable little shiny pink-cheeked angels they were. And how they pealed and tinkled with joy when the great big white feathery goose walked down the aisle right past them and clambered up on stage. And then Leo fell asleep and then the lights went down and Isaac said ‘all dark!’ and the wicked witch came on and he curled tight against me and whimpered ‘too cary, too cary!’ (scary) and then the pyrotechnics started and he wailed ‘outside! outside!’ But we’re strict about him bossing us around so I gripped him tight and whispered to him reassuringly, ‘Please, Isaac, curtail this exhibition of groundless Wagnerian hysterics and set a sturdier example to your peers.’ (I want him to grow up with an over-extensive vocabulary.) Eventually he calmed down and then Clive Rowe came on as Mother Goose and set about his traditional Christmas task of filling the Hackney Empire with his rocket-fuelled joie de vivre.
At the interval Isaac passed sentence. ‘Home! No more goose!’ But I didn’t like to wake Leo and anyway I was enjoying it. The sets are beautiful, the chorus-line is very fetching and there’s a terrific 12-foot monster that throws the crowd into ecstasies of gleeful terror.
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