Dick Whittington review

But Brind also produces the show and writes the script, and I wonder if he was spread too thin. You might not go to panto for logical plots or coherent character motivation, but the basic decision-making often seems muddy here, and transitions in and out of half-rewritten pop songs are clunky and wooden. Dick Whittington leaves Derby for London, but this script feels off the peg: there’s little local lore or references, apart from some light audience interaction (when Dick says “ey up duck”, we say “ey up Dick”, a call-and-response set up at length and barely used again). It also feels as if it could have been staged any time in the past few decades; there are hardly any topical or satirical jokes or references, and there’s absolutely no subversion of the panto format.

Which is fine, if it’s all sparklingly done, but this feels baggy and unfocused. Scenes where characters are free to riff can have vim, but everything between Bow Bells and the evil Queen Rat is tightly scripted in leaden rhymes. It doesn’t help that Wendi Peters is a disappointingly underpowered villain: shrill and squeaky, finding neither laughs nor scares. And in the second half there are some set pieces – a mop routine, a half-hearted slop scene in the sinking ship – that feel under-drilled and fall woefully flat. It may all tighten as the run goes on, but for now, it struggles to transport you out of a giant sports centre and into pantoland.

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