It's just too loosey-Goosey

Mother Goose, at the Oxford Playhouse, until January 15

This year's Oxford Playhouse pantomime, Mother Goose, is written and directed by Peter Duncan of Blue Peter fame. However, there is a lack of narrative drive - perhaps because the original story is under-written.

The plot, if there is one, is minimal. A foolish woman, Mother Goose (Chris Larner) has a goose that lays golden eggs, and trades the goose to a witch in return for a beauty treatment. There are a couple of jolly contemporary pop songs. Accents and idioms from Essex and Newcastle are, unfortunately, jokes. The most entertaining moment happened accidentally during a malfunction of Mother Goose's mechanical crying device, forcing Larner to ad-lib. His requests to the audience to use its collective imagination to finish the scene were funny.

Grace writes: the story was very basic but this didn't matter because all the scenes in the pantomime were good. During the panto I went through all the emotions. We met the good fairy and the bad witch before the panto started.

I started off being very excited about the opening scene – a fair. It was very colourful and exciting with lots of singing and dancing. There was a frightening scene when Mother Goose was made beautiful with scary dancers.

Mother Goose, a man really, was on the stage a lot – a mad and funny character that you could easily trick. This is what the wicked witch (Ashleigh Gray) did to get his/her Goose Eldorada (Will Hawksworth). The Goose didn't know if it was a girl or boy – a bit like its mother. But it was a girl because it laid some gold eggs – and a real egg that hatched into a gosling.

It was a funny panto, but I didn't laugh out loud. Mother Goose had a son, Silly Billy (Paul Charlton), who was very good at playing the fool. There's a daughter as well called Jilly (Nicola Stuart-Hill). She was a tomboy (like her mother) until she fell in love with the duke's son (Gary Albert Hughes).

The best bits in the panto were when all the cast on the stage sang and danced together.

JON LEWIS
AND GRACE LEES, AGED 8