The Christmas show has opened at The Jack and it is part play and part panto. It has dressing up and putting down, comedy, rivalry, a slop scene and people behaving fit to drive you to the edge of madness, capturing of the contradictory nature of Christmas.
In Luke Adamson’s neatly-structured two-hander, the action takes place at a run-down theatre, in the dressing room of Mr Worth and Mr Chancery and on the stage where they are playing the Ugly Sisters in a jaded production of Cinderella.
The two actors couldn't be more different: Worth is devoted to theatre and a faithful supporter of the traditions of pantomime, but for Chancery, it is another job, matter-of-factly “just panto”.
The two are frenemies who meet annually for panto season, one returning with a legacy that can't be let go and which the other has long consigned to history. Now at the end of the run, any affability they managed earlier is exhausted and they are reduced to sharing barely veiled barbed exchanges during costume changes.
The dramatic antidote to this mutual antagonism is their Ugly Sisters routines, where we are treated to a delightful rendition of Irving Berlin’s “Sisters” from White Christmas and a comic mash up of “I’m Too Sexy” and other well-known songs.
Alongside these, the tongue-twister, the song-sheet and the ‘it’s behind you’ scenes, Adamson’s play delivers many panto traditions and, for the cognoscenti, hints at the ropey production values of this Cinderella.
Oh No It Isn’t! is largely autobiographical, drawing on Adamson’s experiences as a writer, director and actor who first trod the boards aged nine in panto. In this respect, it is both a love letter to theatre and a roll call of its iniquities that will get silent nods of recognition from those close to the industry.
At seventy minutes, it is a show that doesn’t outstay its welcome, but another ten would have given Adamson leeway to decompress the action a little, bolstering it with a bit more depth and without a cliché to foreshorten the ending.
Director Kate Bannister balances the dressing room drama with the on-stage frivolity and Terra Guerrero’s often comic choreography, so there is justly no outright winner in a play that presents equal truths.
Bryan Pilkington and Matthew Parker seem to enjoy climbing into Martin Robinson’s attractively well-thought out costumes and increasingly awful wigs to strut about as the Sisters. The Jack’s regular audiences have seen both Parker and Pilkington in frocks before and more recently enjoyed Parker’s comic talents in The Play With Speeches
Oh No It Isn’t! displays other strings to their respective bows, particularly Parker’s Mr Chancery, who has an easy unkindness about him whilst the sadness of Pilkington’s sincere Mr Worth tugs at the heartstrings.
As I said, the play encapsulates Christmas: pragmatism clashing with emotion, hard work and masked disappointments drowned in wine, laughter, songs and merriment, a weird cocktail that feeds something deep inside of us. For those in the theatre industry, its casualties rise to face another day, for the rest of us at least it’s only once a year.