It’s been a vintage year for 80-year-olds in the British theatre. First, there was Glenda Jackson as King Lear. Now there is Roy Hudd as Mother Goose. Aside from the gender switch and the fact that both shows make jokes about eggs, there are few obvious points of comparison. All one can say is that Hudd, as writer and performer, repeats a winning formula he hit on last year at Wilton’s with Dick Whittington: old gags, familiar songs, trad storytelling and painted scenery.
In this version, loosely based on one created by Dan Leno in 1902, Mother Goose emerges as a mix of morality play and Victorian melodrama. The widowed heroine faces eviction at the hands of a cruel squire until she is given a goose that lays golden eggs. Tempted by her new-found wealth, she enters a magic pool that transforms her into a rejuvenated beauty.
By the end, however, she has rediscovered her affinity with the discarded poor. Perhaps it is a bit like King Lear after all, though less so than Cinderella, in which Cordelia is translated into the rejected heroine and Goneril and Regan into the venomous Ugly Sisters.
The chief delight is Hudd as Mother Goose. Max Beerbohm wrote of Dan Leno that “he had the indefinable quality of being sympathetic”. The same might be said of Hudd who, with his gap-toothed cheeriness, seems the last living embodiment of music hall and who shines up the hoariest of jokes. Advertising the enduring appeal of elderly widows, he says: “We don’t yell, we don’t tell and we’re very grateful.” After Mother Goose’s transformation into a peroxided sex-bomb, someone announces: “I do like your dress,” to which Hudd replies: “I bought it for a ridiculous figure.” Forever hitching up his false bosom and joshing his fellow actors, Hudd is the friendliest and most welcoming of dames.
Like all good pantomimes, this one blends past and present. There are characters called Virtue (a twinkling Julia Sutton) and Vanity (a leering Gareth Davies who takes one look at the audience and says, “Aren’t you ugly?”). The songs, ranging from Can’t Buy Me Love to The Rhythm of Life, play on nostalgia. We even get a classic mirror scene in which Mother Goose and Ian Jones as her son precisely replicate each other’s movements. And there are token nods to the present with jokes about Wayne Rooney, Meghan Markle and an imaginary TV show called I’m a Celebrity, Get Me a Career.
Debbie Flitcroft’s production keeps the story moving, Mark Hinton’s designs are highly decorative and there is good support from Ian Parkin as the wicked squire and Amelia-Rose Morgan as his virtuous daughter. There are many more lavish and spectacular pantomimes around but few, I suspect, with such unaffected warmth and heart.
• At Wilton’s Music Hall, London, until 31 December. Box office: 020-7702 2789.
