Jack and the Beanstalk: Adults Only at a glance

Show
Jack and the Beanstalk: Adults Only
Status
Closed at the King's Head Theatre on 3 January 2026
London venue
King's Head Theatre, 115 Upper Street, Islington, London N1 1QN
Run dates
27 November 2025 – 3 January 2026 (selected Thursday and Saturday performances)
Family-friendly version
Ran in parallel, 23 November 2025 – 4 January 2026
Genre
Pantomime (adults-only / 18+)
Running time
Approximately 2 hours, including interval
Age guidance
18+ only. Strong language, strong sexual innuendo, potentially offensive language
Writer / Director
Andrew Pollard
Lead cast
Victoria Scone (Dame Trott), Elliott Baker-Costello (Jack), Priscille Grace (Jill), Mia Ito Smith (Fairy Fullobeans), Pavanveer Sagoo (Pat the Cow), Joseph Lukehurst (Nightshade)
Special guests
Different guest star at every adults-only performance
Producers
King's Head Theatre Productions and James Quaife Productions
Tradition began
2024 (with five-star Cinderella)

Looking back: Jack and the Beanstalk: Adults Only

4.2
★★★★☆

LTH Retrospective Rating

Retrospective by the London Theatre Hub editorial team. Last updated: 13 May 2026.

The Verdict

The King's Head Theatre's adults-only panto returned for its second year in 2025–26 with renewed confidence and double the number of adult performances after the 2024 run sold out. Andrew Pollard, who wrote and directed 2024's five-star Cinderella, returned to do the same for Jack and the Beanstalk, and built a six-strong cast around Drag Race UK's Victoria Scone — the first AFAB drag queen to compete on the UK show and a finalist on Canada vs The World — in a Dame Trott role that gave her every excuse to camp it up. Around her, Elliott Baker-Costello's milkman Jack, Priscille Grace's Jill, Mia Ito Smith's Fairy Fullobeans, Pavanveer Sagoo's cow Pat, and Joseph Lukehurst's villain Nightshade kept the production moving at proper panto pace.

The adults-only schedule on Thursday and Saturday nights doubled as a guest-star showcase, with a rotating cast of cameo turns; Kate Butch's second-act appearance as the Magic Harp was singled out by audiences as a particular highlight. It is a smart commercial model — one creative team, one cast, one set, two completely different shows running in parallel for two completely different audiences — and the King's Head's new 200-seat space below Upper Street is well suited to it. As a piece of Off-West End programming, this is the kind of thing London needs more of.

What Makes It Special

  • The dual family-and-adult format. Most pantos lean either family or grown-up. The King's Head's innovation is running a "scandalous" Thursday/Saturday adult version alongside the standard schedule of family performances — two productions from one company at one venue, with the adult version pulling a completely different audience demographic for the same Christmas weeks.
  • Victoria Scone as Dame Trott. One of the smartest casting choices in Off-West End panto for years. Scone's drag pedigree, comic timing and willingness to lean into both the warmth and the crudeness of a Dame role anchored the entire production.
  • Andrew Pollard's writing-directing combination. Pollard's 2024 Cinderella was the venue's five-star surprise hit. For 2025 he kept the formula — Islington-set, pun-dense, queer-coded, gleefully silly — while widening the cast and the running time. The cumulative effect is that the King's Head now has a Christmas tradition of its own to compete with much bigger venues.
  • The rotating guest stars. Previous years brought Christina Bianco, Cassidy Janson, Vinegar Strokes, Trevor Ashley, Danielle Steers, John Owen-Jones, Amy Ross and Helen Woolf. 2025 added Drag Race UK alumni and West End musical-theatre regulars. The variety meant no two adults-only performances were the same — a genuine repeat-visit hook.
  • The Golden Goose Pay-it-Forward scheme. The King's Head sold a portion of family-version tickets at reduced rates to local schools and disadvantaged Islington families. The adult performances helped fund the scheme. Worth flagging because it's an unusual model for adult panto profits to subsidise community access for the family version.

Everything You Need to Know

What happens in Jack and the Beanstalk: Adults Only?

Andrew Pollard's adults-only Jack and the Beanstalk takes the bones of the classic fairytale — boy, beanstalk, giant, cow, magic beans — and resets the whole thing in present-day Islington with a queer-coded Drag Race-flavoured panto sensibility and an adults-only joke book.

Angel Delight on Udder Street

Dashing milkman Jack Trott (Elliott Baker-Costello) lives with his mother Dame Trott (Victoria Scone) above the family dairy, Angel Delight on Udder Street. The business is failing. Their cow Pat (Pavanveer Sagoo) — a fully camped-up moosical-theatre obsessive nicknamed Cowpatti Lupone — refuses to be milked. The rent is overdue. And the landlord is a greedy giant who has just sent his enforcer, the villainous Nightshade (Joseph Lukehurst), to collect — or take the dairy by force.

The bean deal and the beanstalk

Tricked by Nightshade into selling Pat for a handful of magic beans, Jack discovers overnight that the beans have produced an enormous beanstalk reaching into the clouds. With the help of Fairy Fullobeans (Mia Ito Smith) and his fruit-shop-running love interest Jill (Priscille Grace), Jack must climb the beanstalk, infiltrate the giant's lair, rescue Pat, save the dairy and ultimately save Islington itself from the giant's takeover.

What makes it Adults Only

The adults-only version of the production keeps the same plot, set, costumes and core cast but adds strong sexual innuendo, knowing adult comedy, audience participation that goes places the family version cannot, and a rotating special-guest appearance at every show. The show carries explicit content warnings for strong language, strong sexual innuendo, and potentially offensive language. It is no place for children — but it is exactly the place for an Islington office Christmas party.