Jack's pain was the audience's gain.
Having eschewed a social life in favour of gorging on pantos, I'm bearing up surprisingly well. However, I have developed panto repeat, which means I accidentally belch out nonsensical rhymes, slogans and songs during work hours. At performances, I have also started feeling sick every time the orchestra plays the overture.
Illness also meant that Aled Jones couldn't don tights and perform the title role in Jack and the Beanstalk in Richmond. He had an Achilles tendon injury. His pain, however, was our gain - his replacement was a strapping lad called Andrew Derbyshire. Andrew was very skilled with an emotive key change. He was also fairly good at multi-tasking, being able to sing, wave, scale a beanstalk and avoid choking on an over-compensating smoke machine all at the same time.
Others, however, were not so good at juggling the demands of seasonal theatre. Boycie (John Challis) of Only Fools and Horses, required to speak in rhyme - admittedly never an easy task - fluffed a line. Which wouldn't be so bad if he hadn't been setting up the plot ...
But Richmond didn't seem to mind - and if it did, it was far too polite to show it. After all, this was an audience full of kids called Max, Oliver and Emily - so no thwacking the living daylights out of each other with plastic swords or glo-wands, all handily available from the foyer.
I was tempted to purchase a spinning windmill of lights on a stick, which seemed popular. Judging by the kids' entranced gaze, it looked like it had soporific effects. And if I'm to get through the last two pantos, hypnosis is a very attractive option indeed.
