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The Best Pantos To Book This Christmas: Oh Yes They Are...
The Christmas season brings with it one of Britain's great (and unique) art forms: the pantomime. With dames and best boys, princesses, prince charmings and dastardly villains to hiss, a good panto is a must to raise the festive cheer. Following our pick of shows to book for kids, here's our recommendations for the London pantos – three Jack and the Beanstalks, three Cinderellas, two Aladdins and the, er, Odyssey – to enjoy...
Jack and the Beanstalk at the London PalladiumThe biggest and glitziest of the capital's pantos returns to the Palladium for an eighth year. It is once again marshalled by Julian Clary, who was born for this show, and here plays seaman Smee (titter). He is joined by Jennifer Saunders as Captain Hook in an inspired bit of casting, as well as Nigel Havers, Louis Gaunt and, of course, the great Gary Wilmot as the Dame. This show prides itself on sparing no expense on sets and costumes and conjuring up a jaw-dropping spectacle.
From December 9 to January 14; palladiumpantomime.Com
Aladdin at the Hackney EmpireThe Hackney panto is one of the great annual east London traditions. For a second year it is directed by, and starring, the great Clive Rowe (the only performer to be Olivier nominated for playing a Dame), who will be playing Widow Twankey for the next month. Also starring Natasha Lewis as Abby-na-zaar, Fred Double as Aladdin and Ruth Lynch as the Spirit of the Ring, the show promises incredible costumes, uncontrollable laughter and "song-and-dance numbers that are nothing short of genie-us".
To December 31; buy tickets here
Cinderella at the Lyric HammersmithGet ready to have a ball in west London, courtesy of award winning panto writer and composer Vikki Stone. She brings Cinders (played by Tilly La Belle Yengo) into the present day, where she is a "bonafide boss-lady" running her own business in Shepherd's Bush Market. It's there she meets the dashing Prince Henry, in disguise and on the run from the paps, but of course there are a few bumps in the road to true love, including Cinderella's step-mother and step-sisters who are determined to derail the match. Fun, silly (obviously) and
To January 6; buy tickets here
Jack and the Beanstalk at Theatre Royal Stratford EastStratford East's riotous pantos are always full of outrageous characters, unique takes on classic tales and a lot of laughs. This year, Jack heads up the giant beanstalk to take on the baddie Giant Belch who steals all the villager's mud (destroying their once vibrant mud industry) charges outragous rents and pollutes the air with his... Well let's just leave it at that. With a fantastic original score by Robert Hyman and written by Anna Jordan, this will no doubt be a real festive treat.
To January 6; stratfordeast.Com
Snow White and the Seven DwarfsMirror, mirror on the wall, don't miss the fairest pantomime of them all, runs the tagline, and it's hard to argue. The Greenwich panto is a classic of the genre, with the venue's long running panto baddie Anthony Spargo taking over writing duties this year. Nominated for Offie awards in 2021 and 2022, after winning in 2019, this is a Christmas show with pedigree.
To January 7; greenwichtheatre.Org
Odyssey: A Heroic Pantomime at the Jermyn Street Theatre(Alex Brenner)
The panto that has really torn the rule book up this festive season is at the small, but perfectly formed central-London venue, Jermyn Street Theatre. Taking the Odyssey as its jumping-off point, rather than a more traditional fairy tale, join a load of fantastical characters on a musical, mythical journey. Homer fans, look away now...
To December 31; jermynstreettheatre.Co.Uk
Dick Whittington at Richmond TheatreAnother great dame, this time in the form of comedian and broadcaster Paul Merton, who is playing Sarah the Cook in Dick Whittington in Richmond. He will be joined by comedian Suki Webster, musical theatre performer Wendy Mae Brown and West End star Vivien Parry, as Queen Rat. Dick Whittington (Jack Danson) heads out to find fame and fortune, but will he be able to free the city of revolting rodents and rise to high office as the Lord Mayor?
From December 9 to January 7; atgtickets.Com
Cinderella at New Wimbledon TheatreIf anyone knows about how to bring the best moves to a ball, it's Strictly Come Dancing judge Craig Revel Horward. He is also building on his caustic reputation as a talent show judge by playing Cinderella's wicked stepmother, giving audiences plenty of chances to boo and hiss to their hearts' content. Also appearing in this show, self-described as the "fairy godmother of all pantos", are Olivier nominated Alison Jiear (who once made the semi finals of Britain's Got Talent) and comedian and magician Pete Firman as Buttons. Daniel Norford, who has appeared at the National Theatre, is also in the cast.
From December 8 to January 7; atgtickets.Com
Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad PigJW3 is presenting the first Jewish pantomime, bringing together the great traditions of pantomime and Jewish storytelling. Another first is that it will even have a performance on Christmas day itself. It's Chanukah, and Little Red Riding Hood's village needs a new, affordable energy source. Will Red bring home the bacon? With an on-stage band playing traditional instruments accompanying songs with panto lyrics, it stars Debbie Chazen as the Dame, alongside comedian Josh Glanc as the Big Bad Pig.
From December 10 to January 7; jw3.Org.Uk
Cinderella at Brixton HouseSindi-Ella is struggling to keep her dad's greengrocer shop open on Brixton Lane in the face of a looming megamall, while her life is made a misery by her bougie step-mum and south London-hating step-sister. But a few streets away in a fancy new-build, social-media prodigy Charmz wants to build a connection outside their digital world. This is written by award-winning writer and performer Danusia Samal with music from Duramaney Kamara, aka D L K.
To December 31; brixtonhouse.Co.Uk
Jack and the Beanstalk at the Catford BroadwaySusie McKenna was such a staple of the Hackney Empire pantomime that this publication once dubbed her "the undisputed queen of London panto". She is now bringing her brand of joyful festive show to Catford with Jack and the Beanstalk. Jack, his mum and their cow are living in the kingdom of Lewishfarm where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Can Jack fulfil his destiny? Will his mum find love in the audience? Will Caroline the cow become a TikTok star? Head to Catford to find out.
From December 13-31; broadwaytheatre.Org.Uk
Aladdin at Fairfield HallsAnother show using the 'genie-us' tagline (hey, if it ain't broke...), the Croydon venue is staging an Aladdin of its own, led by EastEnders and Holby star Davood Ghadami, and Croydon local Kiera Nicole, a favourite of kid's Milkshake programming, as Jasmine.From December 16 to January 7; fairfield.Co.Uk
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Top 10 Novels That Interrupt Time
Most novels present the passage of characters' lives in a continuous line. A smaller number, however, disrupt the flow of the line – to interrupt, fracture or even reverse the order of time. I have always been drawn to those books, interested in how a narrative might play with that most basic of plot expectations – change – or, as in one or two of the novels I have listed here, thwart it altogether.
A Hunger by Ross Raisin review – his most ambitious novel yet
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The use of time in my new novel, A Hunger, is one of the unorthodox aspects of its storytelling that I most enjoyed figuring out. Time-wise, there are two alternating strands to the novel: the narrator, Anita, in the present, when she is 56, a sous chef in a restaurant and caring for her husband who is living with dementia; the other strand, which she also narrates, follows her life from the age of six. The two strands twist together, so that Anita's past and present become wrapped around each other, inseparable, as the novel follows her towards a decision about what is the merciful choice for her husband's life, and for her own.
One of the appealing things about writing time in this way – one half of the book advancing week by week, the other half advancing year by year – is to show how a character's language, beliefs and needs are constantly evolving. Which squeezes open one of the central themes of A Hunger: is a person a single individual, in which every moment of their life forms part of the same continuous fabric, or is a person in fact a composite of different individuals, a multi-person whose changing condition might impel them to tear apart the life they have built?
And it is this twisting of the typical change narrative – time instead held back, upended, jump-cut – that energises each of the novels in this list.
1. Light Perpetual by Francis SpuffordNovels that open with the death of all their characters – but then move forward, rather than back – are, to my knowledge, pretty rare. Time, in Light Perpetual, is arrested at the exact moment that a German bomb falls through the roof of a Woolworths, where five children are waiting for their mothers to finish rootling through a new delivery of pans – and whose lives then continue, imagined, "against some other version of the reel of time".
2. Flights by Olga TokarczukA wonderful, sprawling essay-adventure novel. Flights skips merrily between centuries, continents, storylines, registers, points of view – sometimes serious, sometimes daft, always entertaining. It's like reading a festival. (Not, I should add, a literary festival.)
Minute iterations of failure … David Szalay. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian3. All That Man Is by David SzalayA narrative that leapfrogs not only across time but across form – by knitting together the lives of nine men in different decades of life. Nine men whose paths rarely cross; nine men, however, whose preoccupations with love, sex and success fast-forward into a series of brilliant, minute iterations of failure. This is not a novel that will make anybody cry out, "I am so happy to be a man!", but it is one that will undoubtedly make some people think about how not to be, or be with, any of these men.
4. The Heavens by Sandra NewmanThis novel is much too sophisticated for me to explain properly, but here goes: it's a Rubik's Cube of a time-travel story, in which Kate, in an alternate-reality year 2000 (with an environmentalist, female US president) becomes a different person, Emilia, in her sleep, in 1593, where she meets a man who is probably Shakespeare, and her actions in this time-warped dream world keep altering the whole course of history each time she wakes from her dream; the world's history and her own as Kate. And to think: last night I had a dream about eating two bags of dry-roasted peanuts.
5. The Driver's Seat by Muriel SparkA brilliantly weird novel, which feels like a live CCTV feed of a character whose bizarre behaviour makes absolutely no sense, the page often glitching, repeating, spliced with flash-forward stills of where this is all heading. And it is not a plot-spoiler to reveal that where it is heading is dark. Very dark.
6. Time's Arrow by Martin AmisLooking now through my copy of this novel, I can see from my pencil scribbles in the margins (Come off it … 170 pages keeping this going? … Was this book written for a bet?) that I might have been a little sceptical about the premise: a novel about a life written in reverse, from death to birth. The pages slither with intelligence and even though it is challenging, as you make your way to the end/beginning, there is no doubt that this is a classic, maybe even the classic, time-bending text.
Time-inverted … Evie Wyld. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer7. All the Birds, Singing by Evie WyldA contemporary example of the time-inverted novel. I can't find my copy of it but I know that the margins are full of very different scribblings, because this is a novel that, for all the cleverness of its construction, is fundamentally a tender and troubling engagement with characters and place. A story. One strand moves forwards, the other strand backwards, the narrative tension strung by our anticipation of finally understanding the connection between the two.
8. Love by Toni MorrisonTime, in this novel, is a vortex: the past constantly pulling down at the present until they become together a continuously spinning circle. At the centre of this circle is the late owner of a now boarded-up seaside hotel, Bill Cosey, but the real interest of the novel is all the women who once knew him, and the intricate web of relationships between them across scattered decades, bound together by each other's histories as well as the history of civil rights.
9. Train Dreams by Denis JohnsonA beautiful, short book that is profoundly concerned with time: the smallness of an individual's life against time's vastness – and our powerlessness in the face of it to predict or control the future. Plot convention is unthreaded as the narrative moves back and forth through a busted chronology of events; a life in fragments. I wonder, writing this, how many Top 10 lists Train Dreams has featured on? If ever there is a Top 10 of Top 10s I am sure this novel will be on it.
Top 10 four-dimensional novelsMark Blacklock
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10. Mrs Bridge by Evan S ConnellThis novel is situated on the pages like an archipelago, with 117 islands of time-distanced text. An anti-plot that captures perfectly the haphazard, funny, existentially haunting passage of Mrs Bridge's entire life. I love this novel so much (as well as Mr Bridge, which followed 10 years later) – a love that directly inspired my thinking about the possibilities of time in fiction when writing A Hunger.
A Hunger by Ross Raisin is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.Com. Delivery charges may apply.
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