Mother Goose (Hackney Empire)

Clive Rowe is back in pantomime at Hackney, so the season can officially be proclaimed as underway. Mother Goose is possibly the greatest dame role, charting the old girl’s progress from penury to good fortune, with the vanity of human wishes taking her down a side street of false but fantabuloso good looks and hairstyles.

The only problem with Rowe’s utterly beguiling steamroller of a performance is that these changes, while indicated in Susie McKenna‘s script, are not sufficiently highlighted in Susie McKenna‘s production: Rowe is one helluva of a walking wardrobe from the minute he steps out of a large pie – the very opposite of a dainty dish, crudity en croûte – through some highly coloured glad rags ("I’m so poor I can’t even pay attention"), and various headpieces on top of the hats (rather like Charlton Heston’s accumulation of wigs and toupées in A Man for All Seasons).

Susie McKenna, incidentally, is also appearing in her own show (her sixteenth Hackney panto) this year, playing the evil fairy Vanity opposite Sharon D Clarke‘s bluesy good fairy Charity. The rhyming couplet friction between these two traps Mother Goose into believing her own publicity, and she turns up at her own party as Goldfinger, or Shirley Bassey (I think) before settling into a gloriously hideous Dusty Springfield "look" with huge red polka dots on her dress and an enamelled silver wig that might have been nicked from the front of an ice-cream van.

Everything else about the high decibel level show is pretty good: the double life-size goose Priscilla (Alex Ross) who wanders down the centre aisle like the elephant in The Lion King; the flurry of bird-like creatures on huge stalks; the eager village ensemble led by Abigail Rosser’s ginger, pretty-as-porcelain Princess Jill and Kat B’s groovy Billy Goose; the song sheet number which brings the audience, and even the critics, to their feet: "Flap your wings, stamp your feet, shake your tail to the goosey beat."

Traditionalists will pine, though, for something more chaotically funny than a rather tame plate-smashing scene, and for a principal boy with more visible thighs and a fuller chest (Matt Dempsey’s Prince Jack is a masterpiece of simpering irritation). And I’m amazed that Charity and Vanity don’t have new costumes for the walk-down at the end; the budget must have been used up on Clive Rowe‘s final outfit as a big white furry snow goose.

The mixture of blues and pop in Steve Edis‘s score (his sixteenth Hackney panto, too) is a bonus in the pit, where a five-piece band led by Mark Dickman keeps the pot boiling for two-and-a-half hours. While Rowe’s dame remains a wonder of the age through the sheer magnitude of his presence and personality, I think more attention should be paid next time to story line. The "beautification" scene is not what it should be, nor do we have the moments of touching pathos when Priscilla is parted from Mother.