Aladdin at the Lyric Hammersmith, W6
reviewed for The Times, 29 November 2016
When I was small, I hated panto. The tired puns, the insulting drag, the cultural references intelligible only to the ITV demographic. There are only so many times a budding theatre critic can watch David Mellor cavorting with the stars of You’ve Been Framed! before begging Mummy and Daddy for some Complicite.
Yet even the most po-faced child would struggle to keep frowning at Joel Horwood’s glorious, gleeful adaptation of Aladdin for the Lyric Hammersmith. The Lyric has a long legacy of insurrectionary, sophisticated panto, but there’s nothing over-intellectual or inaccessible about this production. If your six-year-old wants a straightforward Aladdin story they’ll still find it here.
The villain of the piece — appropriately for 2016 — is capitalism. Vikki Stone’s preposterous, delicious Abanazer is an Evil Enchanter dressed in gold and green dollar signs, a masonic maestro born of US currency. Emperor One Percent sneers at “Poors”; zero hours contracts keep the inhabitants of Aladdin’s bazaar in submission. My more Toryish sensibilities wanted to demur, but it’s too good-humoured to do anything but laugh. The vibe is Robin Hood, but not Jack Cade.
This is west London, so references are strictly local. A gaudy version of Shepherds Bush Market’s iron arch welcomes us to “Fulhammer Boosh Market”; our hero of “Brentslow” seeks to prove his worth against “Prince Lumpington of Chelsington”. The young ensemble, some sourced from the Lyric’s outstanding outreach programmes in the community, are having a ball.
While Stone is the knockout, there are delightful performances all round, especially from James Doherty’s spectacularly costumed Widow Twankey, who enters on a stonking rendition of Madonna’s Material Girl. The gender play is gently subversive, rather than sexist: Allyson Ava-Brown gives us a sweet take on laddish masculinity when her Jasmine goes on the run disguised as a bantering bloke.
It’s no surprise to see the director Ellen McDougall’s subtle feminism pervade the show; trained in the German avant-garde, she’s an innovative radical who takes over the Gate Theatre in west London next January. In her second panto for the Lyric, she proves she can do mainstream fun too — and keep the rebellion just bubbling at the surface.
The loveable Karl Queensborough returns from last year’s show as Aladdin, and there’s a flying carpet that will have kids agape. What more could you want?
