Jack and the Beanstalk at a glance

Show
Jack and the Beanstalk
Status
Closed at the King's Head Theatre on 4 January 2026
London venue
King's Head Theatre, 115 Upper Street, Islington, London N1 1QN
Run dates
23 November 2025 – 4 January 2026 (six weeks)
Adults-only version
Ran in parallel, 27 November 2025 – 3 January 2026 (selected Thursdays/Saturdays)
Genre
Family pantomime
Running time
Approximately 2 hours, including interval
Age guidance
5+ (suitable for the whole family)
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)
Producers
King's Head Theatre Productions and James Quaife Productions
Accessibility
BSL-interpreted performance Saturday 27 December at 6pm; Pay What You Can performance also available
Tradition began
2024 (with five-star Cinderella)

Looking back: Jack and the Beanstalk at the King's Head Theatre

4.3
★★★★☆

LTH Retrospective Rating

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

The Verdict

Andrew Pollard's second King's Head Theatre panto took the strong base of 2024's Cinderella and extended it: a longer run, twice as many adults-only nights, a fully developed six-strong cast and a sharper production-design package. The family version on which the whole programme rests is a confident, properly built pantomime — Islington-set, songbook-stuffed and acceptably long for a family audience without overstaying its welcome.

Victoria Scone, in her first major London panto Dame role, gave the production its centre of gravity. Around her, the cast was uniformly strong: Elliott Baker-Costello (fresh from the Mamma Mia! international tour) as a confident, likeable Jack; Priscille Grace as a panto-experienced Jill; Pavanveer Sagoo turning the cow Pat into one of the show's reliable laugh-getters; Mia Ito Smith with the show's most playable singing numbers as Fairy Fullobeans; and Joseph Lukehurst — returning from Prince Charming in 2024's Cinderella — relishing the upgrade to full villainy as Nightshade. Eve Oakley's costumes were widely flagged by reviewers as superb. For families looking for a genuine alternative to the Hackney Empire or the Palladium, the King's Head delivers something proudly local.

What Makes It Special

  • Genuinely local Islington panto. Set in Islington, with jokes referencing Upper Street, Angel, Cardiff Lib Dems and local landmarks throughout. Few central-London panto traditions are this rooted in a specific London neighbourhood.
  • Victoria Scone's Dame Trott. The first AFAB drag queen to compete on RuPaul's Drag Race UK brought the dance, the timing and the audience-working command of someone with twenty years more experience than her age would suggest. A breakthrough panto Dame.
  • The new King's Head Theatre venue. The 200-seat purpose-built space below Upper Street, opened in 2024 in a new building behind the original King's Head Pub, is a genuinely good Off-West End auditorium with a proper stage, good sightlines and the technical capacity for Pollard's wig-and-costume-heavy production.
  • 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, funded partly by adult-version revenue. It is one of the few panto programmes in London with a structural community-access mechanism built in.
  • Andrew Pollard's panto craft. A traditional pantomime structure done with proper craft — Pollard's writing-and-directing combination is now responsible for both of the King's Head's Christmas pantos, and the consistency between Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk speaks to a developing house style that other venues should be paying attention to.

Everything You Need to Know

What happens in Jack and the Beanstalk?

Andrew Pollard's family pantomime brings the classic Jack and the Beanstalk story to a present-day Islington setting, complete with songs, slapstick, magic, audience participation and a moo-sical theatre-loving cow.

Angel Delight on Udder Street

Young milkman Jack Trott (Elliott Baker-Costello) lives in Islington with his mum Dame Trott (Victoria Scone), running the family dairy — Angel Delight, on Udder Street. Times are hard. The dairy's only cow, Pat (Pavanveer Sagoo), is a stage-struck moo-sical theatre obsessive who refuses to give milk. And worse: a greedy giant landlord is threatening to take the dairy — and indeed all of Islington — if his rent demands are not met.

The giant's enforcer

Enter Nightshade (Joseph Lukehurst), the giant's evil enforcer, who tricks Jack into selling Pat the cow in exchange for a handful of magic beans. Returning home to his furious mother, Jack discovers overnight that the beans have grown into an enormous beanstalk reaching all the way up to the giant's lair in the clouds.

The climb

With the help of Fairy Fullobeans (Mia Ito Smith) and his courageous love interest Jill (Priscille Grace) — who runs the local fruit shop — Jack must climb the beanstalk, infiltrate the giant's lair, rescue Pat, save the dairy and ultimately defeat the giant. There is a magic harp (the show-stealing late guest cameo in many performances), audience participation, slapstick sequences, a properly built finale and the kind of full-throated company singing that a good Christmas pantomime requires.

The Islington flavour

The script is densely seasoned with Islington-specific jokes — local landmarks, the N1 lifestyle, Upper Street, Angel Tube, neighbouring borough rivalries. Older audience members will recognise more of the references than younger ones, but the broad panto silliness keeps every age engaged. The cow's name — Cowpatti Lupone — is a fairly representative example of the gag density.