Mother Goose

Hackney Empire

Which panto? The plethora of London pantos on offer means there is a serious choice to be made. Christmas 2022 has brought us two Mother Geese battling it
out head-to-head, snapping beak-to-beak –a rumble in the farmyard as fierce as Muhammad Ali v George Foreman in the Congo.

In the red corner, at the Duke of York’s the expensive seats rattle their jewellery to applaud the West End’s Mother Goose from one of Britain’s greatest living
classical actors - Ian McKellen – famed for his Richard III and Lear.

In the blue corner, boosted by Hackney Empire’s century of music hall history and egged on by innumerable invisible dames from up in the heavenly gallery,
is the East End’s Mother Goose; from one of Britain’s greatest living pantomime dames – Clive Rowe. Clive has knocked out fifteen panto-years on the Hackney stage. His fans are not only generations of families in Hackney
who love him, but spirits of Charlie Caplin, Stan and Laurel and Marie Lloyd all of whom played on Hackney Empire stage.

For pantomime to succeed, the audience must participate like celebrants at a Dionysic drama –worship through revelry. Their world must be turned upside
down and right cathartically restored. Pantomime is a theatrical experience where the unselfconscious participation of the audience makes the show. This
explains why it is the Hackney audience that compels attendance – the long- standing familiarity of the Hackney audiences to their panto, their absolute
suspension of disbelief (at all ages), their willingness to stand, to sing along, to be summoned onstage, carries the Hackney Mother Goose to deserved victory
in this theatrical agon.

Panto also requires a cohesive company – and the Hackney players seem like rep company of old – working seamlessly as one - Tony Marshall as the Squire
Purchase delicious antagonist to Mother Goose dressed in Cleo Pettit’s gargantuan costumes.

Although full of contemporary references – itself an ancient panto tradition-Mother Goose has the oldest of t he pantomime plots. The story itself traced through Aesop to ancient Indian fables of Bidpai it carries the moral fable that kindness can be swayed to greedy hardness until finding the path back to the good.

The dame has been played by Dan Leno and Grimaldi, the clowning has echoes of Shakespeare’s Will Kemp.

The Goose herself is like one of these satyrs comes to life on stage, she may be endearing but she bears an alarming resemblance to an extinct megafauna, a
gargantuan carnivorous bird of the jungle, in Hackney she is sweetly domesticated by Clive Rowe.