Gagula: The Panto With Teeth!
★★★☆☆ Energetic
Greenside @ Riddles Court (Venue 16): Fri 7 – Sat 15 Aug 2026
Review by Rebecca Mahar
Pig’s Ear Productions are back with another panto, this year moving away from Shakespeare and into another classic art form: drag, Gagula: The Panto With Teeth!.
Written and directed by Mackenzie Galbraith, Gagula riffs on Dracula, meta-theatre, and pantomime itself in a production that, while not as cohesive as it might have been, is still a snort-worthy good time.
Gabrielle Mann and Buster Van Der Geest. Pic: PEP.
The show opens with the Narrator (Kady Lyon) trying to settle on which scary story to tell the audience (“we couldn’t get Jacob Elordi so Frankenstein is out… we couldn’t get Jacob Elordi so Wuthering Heights is out”), before settling on Gagula.
At once an entirely oblivious Jonathan Harker (Jack Dams) appears on the scene, writing blithely away to fiancée Mina Murray (Gabrielle Mann) and making a note to ask Dracula about rumours of werewolves and vampires in the area.
interesting and hilarious
At the Count’s castle, Harker learns that the Count is in fact the Countess from mistress-obsessed familiar Igor (Charlie Macbeth), and soon the Countess is revealed to be Gagula (Finn Bender), a vampiric dame in corset and no-smudge lippy. Her quest is not drinking blood or a nebulous desire for residential London real estate, but to purchase theatres in which to entrap hungry young theatre graduates and turn them into pantomime characters.
While this is an interesting and hilarious premise, it takes a long time (in a show of only fifty minutes) to come together, and Gagula seems to be conflicted about what kind of show it is. Not quite a panto, not quite a straight comedy, not quite sure whether the villain is dame/Countess Gagula or Abraham Van Helsing (Buster Van Der Geest).
Gabrielle Mann, Kady Lyon and Jack Dams with Buster Van Der Geest. Pic: PEP.
Like many adaptations of Dracula, Gagula gets lost in the sauce of trying to spin together the many epistolary threads of the original story into something cohesive, watchable, and in this case, layered with commentary, irreverence, and the necessary panto elements. Perhaps if Galbraith had spent a little more time with Aurelius’s Meditations rather than declaring it “the most boring book in the world” he might have arrived in a state of λόγος that would have allowed him to more effectively order it all?
never-flagging energy
That said, the performers are putting their whole you-know-what into it. With never-flagging energy and excellent delivery of the show’s many puns, zingers, deadpan jokes, and innuendos (these mostly from Bella Yow’s extremely horny Lucy Westenra), the cast make the most of every moment of verbal and physical comedy.
Their commitment draws every ounce of potential out of the script, which indeed itself has great potential, should it decide to give itself fully to Gagula and be turned into the panto she could make of it. Let them sing! Let them dance! Commit to the bit and give us The House of Gagula!.
It might not leave you gagged and gooped, but Gagula’s well worth your time for a giggle.
Running time: 50 minutes (no interval).
Greenside @ Riddles Court (Willow Studio), 322 Lawnmarket EH1 2PG (Venue 16).
Friday 7 – Saturday 15 August 2026.
Daily: 11.40am.
Tickets and details: Book here at EdFringe.com.
Pig’s Ear Productions Instagram: @pigsearproductions
Linktree: @pigsearproductions.
Charlie Macbeth, Jack Dams and Bella Yow. Pic: PEP.
ENDS
