The Pantomime Adventures of Peter Pan

Festival Theatre,

Edinburgh

Mary Brennan

Three stars

The title clearly nails this show’s true colours to the mast - these are the ‘pantomime’ adventures of Peter Pan, so cue the kind of tomfoolery that never cut loose across the Neverland of Barrie’s original narrative.

We now have a Dame in the buoyant shape of May McSmee (yer man Allan Stewart) formerly Hook’s cook. That piratical Hook was eaten by a crocodile, wasn’t he? But this is panto remember - and Grant Stott, like Stewart, is a long-established mainstay of Edinburgh’s seasonal entertainment, so the croc found him hard to swallow and now Hook’s back to parry patter and punchlines with May McSmee.

From time to time, Stott will say ‘back to the plot’ - ummm…it’s tempting to enquire ‘what plot?’.

Is there a reason why Tink has wheeched Wendy back to Neverland? The words ‘Peter, pixie dust, he can’t fly anymore’ make an occasional appearance, but otherwise they hunker down offstage and let Stewart, Stott and regular compadre Jordan Young get on with the comedy cantrips that interrupt the flow of upbeat songs and dance stuff.

The latter includes some crowd-pleasing hi-energy moves from Hook’s pirate crew, aka Flawless. Even more crowd-pleasing is when Young’s Smee gets in on their act and grooves along with the same kind of nifty precision that makes his rapid verbal reprise of the action such an audience hit.

Stewart and Stott, as we’ve come to expect, go their dinger in exchanges that mingle new wisecracks with old jokes. Rebecca Stenhouse (Tink), Clare Gray (Starkey) and Robyn Whyte (Wendy) all - I was going to say ‘knock their pan out’, but Keiran Lynch’s Peter emerges unbruised to fly again.

It’s not Barrie as we know it, but it’s big and it’s brash and it’s eager to win us over - so, in its own terms, it manages to be ‘barry’ nonetheless.