This year’s Glastonbury pantomime – a great local institution, if ever there was one! –  turned out to be a classic example of a Curate’s Egg.

Glastonbury-based Shadow of the Tor (a Production Company) created and put on their own version of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ – and I was a member of the audience last night.

The ideas were great; the characters well-developed; the technical side excellent: Backstage crew, make-up people, lighting and sound wallahs, props bods and costume creators all worked wonders. The result was an effective, colourful and magical stage setting.

The cast – dogged by mishap and illness – had clearly worked hard, and weathered ghastly thespian storms. Most performances were good, and some excellent: Janetta Morton was superb in her role as Narrator; Alison Hall Leitch, sumptuously serpentine in purple, was a magnificently malevolent Witch Chloe; Jon Coyne, replete with perky pink kilt (hmmm!), made an endearingly loopy lady woodcutter – and Rhiannon Locke, drafted in at the eleventh hour, was wonderful as Hansel.

The performance was, however, an object lesson in the vital role of a tight script – and, sad to relate, this side of the show was disappointingly long-winded, at times turgid, and verbose/leaden. The phrase ‘Less is More’ is just as true of drama as it is of novel-writing – and ‘Hansel and Gretel”s script could have done with a jolly good pruning!

The absence of a rousing song was disappointing: A wasted opportunity for group bonding and audience participation, the panel game being a rather lame duck in comparison.

Well done to everyone involved!