Horrible Histories, with its colourful costumes, awful puns and audience participation, is part of the tradition of the pantomime season– oh yes it is!

But there’s much more to the Birmingham Stage Company’s shows than a cornucopia of corn.

The Awful Egyptians, for example, features informative and entertaining sketches on gruesome grave diggers and the mummification process, plus scary 3D “Bogglevision” creatures including a cobra and scarab beetle.

Our heroine is a bored schoolgirl called Maisy (the excellent Lauryn Redding) who travels back 3,000 years to meet Rameses II (played with plummy gravitas by Michael Moulton), and is so enthused by the experience she even learns to appreciate Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias.

This show, in conjunction with The Ruthless Romans, features a hard-working and multi-talented cast of just five, but they generate thrills, spills, screams and laughs aplenty.

Look out for their return in 2012 with the Terrible Tudors and Vile Victorians – history has never been so much fun.