The Lyric’s annual pantomime is usually the curtain-raiser for the festive season – and, in retrospect, its cancellation last year was a portent of doom for theatreland’s Christmas. Now it’s finally “Open Sesame” for this postponed Aladdin, which features the venue’s usual blend of the topical and the traditional. But, agonisingly, this latest edition misses the mark.

Scripted by former Lyric panto performer Vikki Stone, it’s a contemporary London tale in which Aladdin wears a tracksuit, Jasmine longs to be a graphic designer, and Twankey’s launderette doubles as a microbrewery. The opening number, set to the tune of Blur’s Parklife, tells us what to expect – no Meisner technique, plenty of slipping on banana skins. Yet, on the night I saw it, that piece of farce was botched by imprecise staging. And so it continued: constant commentary met with baffled silence, while both story and physical comedy felt undernourished.

There’s also the enormous distraction of Stone’s decision to make Jasmine’s father a tiresome Boris Johnson parody. He’s a clueless emperor in a blonde wig, fat suit and clown shoes who loves flag-waving, painting snacks and arresting protestors. As played by Kate Donnachie, who does double-duty as the beatboxing Genie, he bounces around like Tigger and sounds like a breathless Princess Margaret. But it’s too broad-brush to work as satire. A hastily added reference to Peppa Pig World is just left hanging.

Likewise poor Stephan Boyce, as Twankey, is handed a list of painful gags about recent events like the petrol shortage and the Suez Canal blockage – none as good as those doing the rounds on social media months ago. One pun was so poor that an irate specator in the stalls actually heckled Boyce, yelling “I don’t get it!”

Thank goodness, then, for Irvine Iqbal, supplying a proper boo-hiss villain in Abanazer. Though he too does some half-hearted Boris-bashing – laying out his plans in a refurbished briefing room with interjections of “Next slide, please!” – he incorporates the comedy well into his characterisation of the constantly thwarted schemer. Not even an all-powerful villain, he sighs, can get Hammersmith Bridge reopened.