Is this Britain's most politically-correct panto?

And with a character said to be Greta Thunberg and a climate change denying giant, many may agree.

Writer Peter Duncan, the former Blue Peter presenter and Chief Scout who is also playing Dame Trot, has branded it ‘the planet-saving panto’.

“Jack and the Beanstalk is a story of our time,” he said. “The beans have come to symbolise our connection to Nature and the Giant can be seen as representing all those that resist the shift towards renewables, whether that’s individual climate change deniers or big corporations continuing to burn fossil fuels.”

A spokesman for The Lighthouse theatre said: "It's a traditional family pantomime and in the tradition of panto it incorporates elements of the world in which we live."

Peter, who joined Friends of the Earth in the mid-1970s, says he has been energised by the global movement led by 16-year-old Swedish student Greta Thunberg that saw 1.6 million students in 120 countries take part in strikes to press the world’s politicians to act on climate change.

“Green issues are very dear to my heart, they always have been, and I’m very taken by the way that Greta Thunberg can speak and the whole world listens,” he said. “These issues are very mainstream now in a way that was impossible to imagine forty years ago.”

The story revolves around the character of Thunberg who is shut away by a giant when she tries to discuss why she was taking part in the school strikes over climate change.

“The panto will have a scene in which the school kids rebel against the Dame and her old-fashioned lessons and walk out in protest,” he said. “It will be a funny scene, but it’s a way of bringing elements of the real world into our imaginary panto world.”

“The great panto themes are about things we all recognise – love, loss, poverty, success – but the particularly interesting thing about Jack and the Beanstalk is the way it teaches us to look after what we have – do that and we can have a good harvest,” said Peter.