Oh No It Isn’t! Oh Yes It Is…

Oh No It Isn’t!, a new sort-of-pantomime for adults written and directed by Nick Walker, hits up the Belgrade’s B2 Studio alongside their traditional Christmas pantomime for children Jack and the Beanstalk on the main stage. Billing itself as perfect for office parties or a night away from the kids, the comedy-thriller has its four cast members, who are all performing in an am-dram production of Jack and the Beanstalk, embroiled in plots to kill each other. 

We are set backstage in the first half, with a costume rail and props table to set the scene, and the stained-glass painterly backdrop is spun around for the second half, where we revel in the play-within-the-play and abounding dramatic irony. Prop guns and real guns, two possibly poisoned apples, white underpants, and a very fetching two-man cow costume are the comic ingredients of this grown-up panto.

Until the arrival of Katy Stephens on stage, the dialogue is flat and poorly projected but fortunately it picks up as we discover the murder plots through the losing of a specially imported pistol which turns out to actually be the prop gun and a comical search for the real one which ensues throughout. Stephens carries the show with pleasing over-acting, theatrical self-awareness and parodic panto songs. Her performance here as the principal boy in a panto interacts intertextually with her cross-dressing performances at the RSC.

The play is very meta, with the audience roused into singing along, one poor audience member from the front row dragged on stage to fulfil the mock coup de theatre ending, playful use of different pantomime traditions and ridiculous thriller plots and in-jokes. The locals in the audience were evident, from their raucous reactions to quips such as a reference to the Belgrade’s ‘award-winning car park’, Stephens’ run at the RSC, the Jaguar – a seedy bar just around the corner – and stereotypes of the repertoires at the Birmingham Rep and Warwick Arts Centre. Even a piece of set from the Belgrade’s actual production of Jack and the Beanstalk was trundled across the stage. The audience were in stitches as one obligatory sing-along had the lyric boards disordered so that instead of singing ‘Jack is high on life, life, life’ we got ‘Jack is high on crack, crack, crack’.

An absurd, silly evening’s entertainment and at just over an hour, there are just enough good gags in the rather mediocre script to keep up the pace.

Oh No It Isn’t is showing at the B2 Studio, Belgrade Theatre, Coventry until 28 December 2013.

(As an aside, the promo image looks very much like Daisy the Cow had a drunken photo taken at Smack, rather than a headshot.)