“I do like a warm hand on my entrance,” purrs Julian Clary on his first appearance as an outrageously overdressed Robin Hood. The classic innuendo sets the tone for this latest Palladium panto, where the smut is as OTT as the sets, costumes and effects, and no one cares too much about the plot. Maybe they rein in the fellatio gags for family matinees. Then again, this is Clary: so probably not.
He has a lot of men to keep merry, he confides: “It’s a miracle I can walk!” But he has a nice bungalow in Sherwood Forest they’ve decorated for him: “Friar Tuck had a hand in my back passage.”
His Maid Marian is “Channel Five’s sultry star” and sometime cruise-ship entertainer Jane McDonald, gamely fielding jokes about her age, northern accent and supposed penchant for pork pies. “What will our children be called,” she coos. “A miracle,” he mutters with an eye-roll.
From 2016 Andrew Lloyd Webber made it his mission to bring the kind of panto he saw as a boy back to the theatre he now owns. In fact, he’s minted a new tradition, built around Clary and a shifting troupe of veterans and newcomers.
Unnerving ventriloquist Paul Zerdin, indefatigable Nigel Havers and triple-threat musical-theatre charmer Charlie Stemp are back as Merry Men. Gary Wilmot does a ker-ching cameo and Rob Madge is the Spirit of Sherwood, a “made-up panto afterthought” archly covering scene changes.
The newbies are McDonald, Tosh Wanogho-Maud as a frightfully butch Little John, and Marisha Wallace, wrapping her powerful lungs around the wafer-thin villain role of The Sheriff of Nottingham.
No expense has been spared for the razzmatazz. Clary is gaudily got up as a castle, an outcrop of mushrooms, an owl and a Wanted poster. There’s a CGI prelude involving Havers as a series of classic heroes, and a later 3D trip through a forest of horrors. IRL, Clary’s Robin vanquishes an animatronic dragon on a flying fire engine while muscular hose monkeys dance to YMCA. No, it doesn’t make sense. Shh, it’s panto.
But while some tropes of this bastardised but now quintessentially British art form are honoured, others are scanted. There’s fun interplay with adults in the audience and kids brought on stage, a peerless rendition of a slapstick round song and a singalong. But the tradition of call-and-response is pretty much stamped on by Clary – oh yes it is! – and there’s only a meagre scattering of topical references.
I’d have liked less video, and a plot that at least gestured towards narrative coherence. But otherwise, Michael Harrison’s production is an effective celebration of the showy elements of panto that mark most people’s introduction to theatre. Clary’s ability to spark off the audience and his corpsing co-stars is matchless. We should kneel before the master. No, not like that! Honestly, you people…
London Palladium, to Jan 12, lwtheatres.co.uk
