It was a significant performance for me as I was taking my two-year-old grandson to his first ever theatrical event. Although I was a little apprehensive as two years is undoubtedly a little young for a family pantomime, I was in any case keen to see how he would react to real people capering about on stage with all the lighting, colourful set, costumes and music that attend the traditional fare (was enthralled!).

Yesterday’s performance was a schools’ matinee a day before the official first night. I confess to never before having been to such a performance on the auditorium side of the footlights and must tell you the experience was enlightening.  The lesson for me and indeed for any director of pantomime was that if you get the basics right the audience will do the rest. This group of children, six to ten year olds I’d say, were thoroughly signed-up to the whole experience. They were not suspending their disbelief or any such nonsense, they were imaginatively engaged in what was going on before them on stage. That’s what we all do when confronted with any work of art. (You could argue that the success or otherwise of any work of art depends in no small part on the extent to which it achieves that outcome.) They were cheering and hooting, jumping up and pointing, baying and laughing, caught up in the atmosphere with ne’er a trace of self-consciousness or embarrassment. One could only be envious and I found myself nearly moved to tears by their engagement and delight. The din was a wonderful sound.

This is a panto stripped to the bones: a christening, a slighted nasty fairy, a curse, a good fairy a young princess, a prince…love. Add silliness and song, some dance, a dragon (!!) and a few scraps for the mums and dads (or the teachers) and there you have it.

Amy Lyons as Princess Beauty, the programme tells us, is in her first professional engagement and one of the highlights of the show.  She sings sweetly and acts the role of ingénue with peart assurance, relating to the young audience something like an older sister as she confides her eighteen-year-old desire to bag herself a prince (plenty of ‘oohs’ and giggles here). A somewhat jejune Prince Hugo (Matthew Manning) fitted the bill whilst Nathan Blyth as Fester the Jester supplied a conveyor belt of Christmas cracker jokes.

Actors love to play baddies and Katherine Parker-Jones clearly wasn’t going to leave anything in the dressing room with a child-munching Carabosse that had the audience shrieking with indignation. Ian Good as Nurse Dottie Dettol gives us a classic pantomime Dame, quirky and saucy, whilst in his role as director has the certainty of touch that gets the most from his blueprint, giving us a colourful blast of Christmas cheer.