BERWICK Kaler has broken every rule in the book of pantomime in pursuit of taking the Theatre Royal institution a little further each year.

Consequently, the show makes as much of a joke out of its own life force as of pantomime convention, and so Suzy Cooper can greet Kaler’s dame with “ah, a real person” after first surveying the audience upon her entry.

This year’s production – the fifth Jack And The Beanstalk of the dowager dame’s 32 years in York – is out of this world or, at least, its oddest creation comes from another planet (Michael Joseph’s Alan The Alien).

Entering on a stair-lift, as if to send up his age of 64, writer, dame and co-director Kaler has strayed further than ever from Pantomime Planet Earth. The plot could well be one of the glittery UFOs hovering in space in Nigel Hook’s set, as it is a struggle to keep abreast of exactly where we are in the story amid the plethora of bonkers routines, in-joke stage business and retro references.

Blame it on the beans: no ordinary beans this season but apparently jelly beans, and the ensuing convoluted script rushes around as if on a surfeit of E numbers.

Regular turns tend to have good moments rather than outstanding performances and the script is similarly hit-and-miss. Martin Barrass, in his 25th year, becomes a wobbly-bellied Sumo wrestler and later plays Laurel to Kaler’s Hardy (in what may be a forerunner of a Theatre Royal show next year; watch this space).

Barrass now takes the entire brunt of the water slapstick scene too, dressing as a blonde to reprise Kaler’s old wig-losing schtick, Berwick being confined to water-throwing duty. Not for the first time, the splosh has lost its splash; time, gentlemen, please, to lay it to rest.

David Leonard’s grandstanding thespian tendencies are marshalled in the bellows-bottomed baddie Nastidramas, his first scene allowing him to mimic Peter Sellers, Max Wall, Kenneth Williams and Laurence Olivier’s Richard III in one devilishly good routine, although nothing quite matches it afterwards.

Not one of those bygone names will mean anything to anyone young, but Kaler knows his audience, and so the winks to the past fit comfortably with the mass of 2010 pop culture in this Bean bag. Leonard blows a vuvuzela; Kaler’s hand puppet is a meerkat; and the second half opens with an all-American dancing pastiche of Glee.

Suzy Cooper’s pukka principal girl, the university-educated Jill Ardley Worthit, is all in pink a la Legally Blonde (before her glorious mimicking of Leonard’s Max Wall); AJ Powell’s Jack Nutt and Barrass send up Oirish imps Jedward; and Kaler plonks a telephone on his head for the showpiece musical number, Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance.

Amid the manic mayhem, Sian Howard is more of an interloper from an old-school pantomime in her trio of diverse womanly roles. Another blast from the past comes with the bell-ringing routine, an old Kaler favourite, that puts the camp into campanology as he, Barrass and Powell swing from the ropes in nuns’ habits, but this scene needs to find its timing and punchline.

The 2010 Beanstalk is yet to be full of beans, not least because it is cramming in too much visual information. In keeping with our Coalition government times, cuts will be inevitable, administered by Kaler and co-director Damian Cruden, to find comic momentum and greater coherence.

Let’s finish on a high, however: the Look North film sequence with Harry Gration and guess who as Christa Ackroyd is sublime.

Jack And The Beanstalk, York Theatre Royal, until January 29. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk