Treasure Island - The Pantaloons

Huge amounts of energy. Huge amounts of silliness. Huge amounts of fun.

This incredibly fast-paced production of Treasure Island by The Pantaloons (which I saw in Eastbourne on 25^th July 2015) sees just three actors play all the characters. There follows an entertaining variety of madcap characterisations and questionable regional accents. And audience interaction, singing, drumming, ad libbing, and so much packed in you wonder that the cast don’t just collapse in a heap at the end!

I really enjoyed it. So did the kids in the audience around me. They were completely rapt throughout.

In a lot of ways, watching The Pantaloons’ Treasure Island is like watching kids playing at being pirates. The plastic swords, the parrot puppet, the hand gestures to show imaginary spurts of blood when injured. And all played with such gusto and exuberance.

I particularly enjoyed the sword fights (hey, I’m a big kid), and the hip hop medley as Jim ‘drives’ the ship.

I have to confess there were times when I didn’t entirely follow what was going on plot-wise – but it didn’t bother me in the slightest. I was having too much fun.

I’ve read the original book of Treasure Island (I’m afraid it hasn’t stuck in my head much), and I’ve seen the Muppets’ version on film (which has stuck in my head much more). The Pantaloons’ version rivals the Muppets’ for zaniness and probably surpasses both versions in terms of pace.

Really, the huge amount of energy on stage was something to behold.


The Pantaloons are on tour with Treasure Island until 30^th August 2015. See their website for full tour details.

They will be returning to Eastbourne’s Under Ground Theatre on 11^th August with Much Ado About Nothing. After their Treasure Island and Pride and Prejudice, I’m looking forward to seeing what else they’ve got up their sleeves.

Peter Pan Goes Wrong - Mischief Theatre

Laughter is a funny thing. (Pun intended). I can spend all day laughing at little things – but go into a theatre to watch something that’s designed to make people laugh and my laughter becomes something different. Suddenly it’s a reward I can choose to bestow or not. It’s an effort. It’s something that has to be cajoled out of me.

Or at least, that’s how it felt while watching Mischief Theatre’s Peter Pan Goes Wrong at the Devonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne, on 24^th March 2015.

People around me were in hysterics. I found some bits quite amusing. I suppose it’s all personal taste.

This play comes from the same people as The Play that Goes Wrong, which by all accounts is very funny indeed. So I went into Peter Pan Goes Wrong ready and expecting to be entertained.

The conceit of the play is that a small amateur dramatics society is putting on a Christmas production of Peter Pan. For me – while they squeezed the mileage out of the am dram bit – they could have made more of the Peter Pan bit.

The original Peter Pan (without anything going wrong) is a playful, mischievous text. It’s full of knowing winks to the audience and doesn’t shy away from the fact that it creates an imaginary world where fantastical, ridiculous things happen. I can’t help but feel that if Mischief Theatre could have found a way to tease this out in Peter Pan Goes Wrong then they would have had a much funnier play on their hands.

But they weren’t really interested in Peter Pan. Their main focus was the am dram aspect of it all, which they played well. They were completely committed to the world they created for the amateur theatre company.

The programme on sale had biographies for the characters within the play who were the cast of Peter Pan. There were fake adverts in the programme which related to the world of the play. In the interval, Christmas music was played – as Peter Pan was supposed to be the amateur company’s Christmas production.

We, the audience, were very much cast as the audience at the amateur company’s performance. When the cast addressed us as the audience, they were in character as the amateur actors addressing their own local audience. They played it straight in this respect.

There was no suggestion of the third layer – that we were an audience at the Devonshire Park Theatre watching a professional company pretending to be amateurs. There was no knowing wink to the audience, nor any acknowledgement that they were creating an imaginary world where ridiculous things happen.

Any why should there be? Judging by the laughter around me, this wasn’t a problem for most of the audience. But I found it a tricky position to be in. I was being asked to suspend my disbelief – and yet I was also being asked to laugh. If I really did buy into the world of the play, then the evening was not funny but painful. Lord knows I’ve seen enough not-very-good amateur productions in my time.

Despite these reservations, there were moments that made me laugh out loud. And there were moments that I recognised with amusement from real productions I’d seen. I just felt that it could have been much funnier if only Mischief Theatre’s writing and direction had been a little more mischievous.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - The Royal Ballet

Is there a better start to a performance than the sound of an orchestra tuning up? That single A note and then the rest of the instruments joining in… And then the conductor comes on and we all applaud and we’re off!

The Royal Ballet’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (at the Royal Opera House Dec 2014) has all the trappings of a traditional ballet, which it at once subverts and enjoys beautifully. The music and choreography feel as if they would fit in one of the classics, at times nodding to ballets such as Swan Lake in an affectionate pastiche.

The notorious multiple curtain calls of a ballet are also in some evidence here – but they are lampooned by the Queen of Hearts’ unashamed milking of the audience applause at the end of her solos.

It’s interesting that the Queen of Hearts (Zenaida Yanowsky) is the only one to break the fourth wall and acknowledge the audience’s presence mid-story. Twice, still perfectly in character, she encourages the audience to applaud more – and then signals when to stop. Perhaps inevitably, she’s the dancer who gets the biggest cheer of the night at the final curtain call.

But then who would have thought that a classical ballet could be so funny? The Queen of Hearts, in particular, is a great comic creation, but Alice (Sarah Lamb), the White Rabbit (Ricardo Cervera), and others all prompt laughs too. It’s all so perfectly choreographed and performed, it seems effortless in managing to be both funny and beautiful, traditional and new.

And it’s imaginatively put together besides the actual dancing and music too. The use of projections and puppetry in telling this dreamlike tale are incredibly effective, the floating Cheshire Cat is inspired, and the costumes (particularly the tutus in the shape of suits of cards) are very clever.

The story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been adapted to fit a ballet style and structure in this production. So we have the usual characters and set pieces like the Mad Hatter’s tea party (in this ballet the Mad Hatter tap dances!), but we also have a framing narrative (or two) and a bit of a love story as well. We see roles being doubled up – along the lines of Hook/Mr Darling in Peter Pan, here we have Queen of Hearts/Mother – and the bringing of part of the story into the present day provides another fresh angle.

All of this draws on and feeds into the sense of Alice in Wonderland as a sort of modern myth or folk tale. Like Peter Pan, the story and characters are so well known that they can be shaped and pulled any which way and still feed back into the myth. The ‘original’ almost ceases to matter when a story has permeated the culture to such an extent. Alice is like Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty now – she’s in a book, a Disney film, a ballet. A story that gets retold. Re-imagined. And surely that’s the best any story can hope for?

Bleak House - The Pantaloons

Full of fun, full of pathos, full of character. This adaptation of Dickens’ Bleak House by The Pantaloons (performed at Eastbourne’s Underground Theatre on 25^th October 2014) was a treat from start to finish.

In the vein of their comprehensive(ish) The Canterbury Tales, The Pantaloons promised to present all 67 chapters of the novel Bleak House on stage. And, although they sometimes forgot which chapter number they were up to, they did not disappoint. With some scenes lingered over and some chapters dispatched in a sentence, the cast of five swept us through the story and the multitude of characters with charm and flair.

I read Bleak House when I was at university, and I watched the BBC’s rather brilliant 2005 adaptation not long after reading the book, so I inevitably started the evening with that version in mind. But it didn’t take long for me to forget all about it.

Dickens’ larger than life characters suit The Pantaloons’ style perfectly – and we were treated to some classic performances in Bleak House. Ross Drury in the guise of Krook, Hortense or Guppy only had to walk on stage to get a laugh, and the Smallweed family were another characterful highlight.

But it wasn’t just the broader characters who made the evening so memorable. The quieter parts and more poignant moments were equally well played. As the deaths mounted and truths unravelled in the second half, the transitions between comedy and pathos were seamless.

The background music and songs helped build this atmosphere: sometimes haunting, sometimes used to comedic effect, and sometimes with self-referential lyrics telling us how many chapters until the interval. My favourite chapter from the book (the spontaneous combustion scene, obviously) was also a great moment on stage; the tension building – with help from the music and lighting – to a comedy-horror climax that ended the first half.

Finally, I really ought to give a mention to the audience, who – as always in a Pantaloons show – played a big part in making the evening an entertaining one. (It was very sweet of the cast to comment on as much at the end of the performance too – always nice to feel appreciated as an audience!).

The Pantaloons are experts at audience interaction and during the course of this performance of Bleak House they good-naturedly poked fun at two particular audience members: an ‘inebriated actor’ who had also been in the audience at their History of Britain in the summer, and a man called Owen. When the time came in the plot for a murderer to be revealed, a dramatic pause was left. With perfect timing, an unknown audience member called out: “It was Owen!”

I enjoyed that, and The Pantaloons seemed to as well. And the same goes for the whole of Bleak House. A treat from start to finish.


The Pantaloons are currently on tour with Bleak House - visit their website www.thepantaloons.co.uk for more info.

Peter and Alice - Michael Grandage Company

When you go to see a play that stars Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw, you’re ready for the acting to be pretty damn good. When the play is about Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland, and you’ve studied children’s literature at university, you’re aware that the subject matter has the potential to be very compelling indeed.

So this was the position I was in when I went to see Peter and Alice by the Michael Grandage Company at the Noël Coward Theatre on 27^th April. I did not come away feeling disappointed.

This was a play about stories and truth; about memory and fantasy and reality; about childhood and adulthood and what ‘growing up’ means. (This last happens to be what my university dissertation was about. I think the playwright must have read some of the same books as me for research – particularly Jacqueline Rose’s influential The Case of Peter Pan, and possibly works by writers such as James R. Kincaid and Peter Coveney as well).

Early in the play, the real-life prototype for Alice (Judi Dench’s character Alice Liddell Hargreaves) speaks about people’s reaction on meeting her. She talks about the associations that they bring with them, and how meeting her causes them to remember how they were when they first read the book as children. The play itself, of course, does not escape such associations. Many of us these days know Peter and Alice through the filter of Disney; we think we know about J M Barrie because we’ve seen Johnny Depp play him in Finding Neverland.

Above all, we know Peter Pan and Alice as characters. When these fictional characters turn up on stage, they need no introduction. And it seems entirely appropriate that they are the final two on stage, after their real-life counterparts have departed.

Amongst our group, there was some discussion about whether the final two lines of the play, detailing how Alice Liddell Hargreaves and Peter Llewellyn Davies died, were necessary. Hadn’t their contrasting endings been made apparent already? Did the facts of ‘real’ life need to be spelt out, when the ‘fiction’ played out before us had implicitly showed us the truth?

The play was thought-provoking, and we all seemed to take different things away from it. An anti-war message, a celebration of childhood imagination, a sense of melancholy and grief. And especially watching this so soon after the excellent Broadchurch finished – how could we categorise the authors’ relationships with children? Could we? Should we?

I’ll just finish with a little anecdote, which reflects beautifully on the differences between childhood and adulthood, fantasy and reality, as explored in the play.

The day after we went to see Peter and Alice, some of us were talking to a 5 year old child of our acquaintance. The little girl loves Peter Pan and often plays at being Wendy. A few days previously, one of the grown-ups in our group had come across the child dressed up and holding a hook. The grown-up wondered where the 5 year old had found such an item, and, as we were all gathered together now, asked her:

“Where did you get that hook the other day?”

The 5 year old, as if the answer was patently obvious, replied:

“From Captain Hook!”