Jack has to sell the cow to get money so he and his starving mother can live; beans, beanstalk, giant…or so you thought. But what if the tale was set in a horny village in Yorkshire? Apparently that would make Jack’s mother an ex-TV star, the local priest would be in the closet, the Fairy God Mother becomes a Fairy God Gay and the beanstalk looks a lot like a… Not to mention that the evil Lady Fleshcreep wants to sell the farm and the land surrounding it to build a #resort.

The second show in the ‘He’s Behind You’ show repertoire, this production company made their bold debut last year with Sleeping Beauty Takes A Prick. The team is made up of writers John Bradfield and Martin Hooper, director Andrew Beckett, and panto dame Matthew Baldwin, who “make big naughty gay pantomimes for adults.”

Playing emphasis on ‘for adults’, this show is definitely not for the prudish or the easily offended!

The design is as bright and colourful as you’d expect from a classic pantomime. We love the use of traditional means in regards to having a background curtain that gets pulled across the stage and a painting along the main back wall. The design of the beanstalk is mind-bogglingly good with its level of detail and consideration about how it looks from all angles, the props are utterly hilarious, and the costumes are truly iconic. Costume designers Robert Draper and Sandy Lloyd are visionaries with their Dame costume designs, especially Dame Trott’s theatre dress, which we could easily imagine cosplayers wearing at Musical Con.

A combination of risqué writing and direction, which clearly understands what the tropes of panto are and how to bend them over backwards, really make this show a full bodied piece.

From start to finish, even the most sceptical of adult audience members are fully on board with the level of audience participation. A unique version of “it’s behind you” has us in stitches as we watch Dame Trott shoot at her beaver with a shotgun. Frequent jokes are made, in good spirits and with consent, about the poor person in the front row who makes eye contact with the Dame. An updated villain, who’s like Regina George on steroids, has us all booing the second she enters the room. Of course, no pantomime would be complete without a sing-a-long and everyone in the audience really enjoys singing an updated version of ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’. This really keeps the audience engaged throughout, adapting the form to fit the active needs of both audience members who grew up annually going to pantomimes and new audiences, who may be experiencing a pantomime for the first time.

On the note of updating, it is amazing to see normalised queer representation in a pantomime performed by a professional company and to see queer people having a fairytale ending in a semi-classic story.

Whilst we are laughing throughout the whole show at the filthiest of dirty jokes, there are points when we aren’t sure whether we should be, given that the production does also include jokes about religion and current politics. That being said, we think that the use of situational humour in combination with dark humour works really well in creating tonal difference and facilitating different audience member’s senses of humour.

The story itself does have some strong emotional beats. We adore seeing Reverend Tim’s (Joe Grundy) arc of self-acceptance and acceptance of the coexistence of stereotypical non-pairings, and we love seeing Jack’s (Keane Adolphis Johnson) journey to discovering the differences between romantic and sexual love. Above all else, we think it’s perfect that the villain, Lady Fleshcreep (Jordan Stamatiadis), gets taught a proper lesson instead of magically turning good.

A hilariously saucy, queer-celebratory take on the classic pantomime spirit we all know and love.

**** Four stars

Reviewed by: Megan O’Neill

For more info on Jack and the Beanstalk: What a Whopper, please click here.