Our Prince and our Beast in Eastbourne panto

Beauty and the Beast will run from December 8-January 14, with tickets available from eastbournetheatres.co.uk or call the box office on 01323 412000.

It’s a gig close to home for Lewes who is originally from Brighton, but it also means that he can stay with his brother and his brother’s fiancée, Jack and Lara, who both teach at Eastbourne College. Jack is “the rugby coach legend” and Lara is head of English there.

“This is my third year in Jordan Productions. The first one was in Potters Bar two years ago and the last one was in King's Lynn. They do quite a few around the country and the shows rotate. This is my third one but my second time that I have done Beauty and the Beast and it's just a great show. What is lovely about Jordan Productions is there's a real feel for it, a great look, great actors, great atmosphere, great scripts which always seem relevant and quick and witty. I just look forward to doing it so much.”

Lewes made his panto debut as the world was navigating its way post pandemic. He graduated in 2018 and had effectively a year and a half as a “regular graduate": “At the time I remember feeling that we must surely be the most unlucky cohort of graduates in the whole of history but obviously since then I have worked with and spoken to people who were at drama school during the pandemic and they really did have a tough run of things, as everyone else did of course, but can you imagine trying to play a wet cabbage in the rain via Zoom on your parents’ living room floor! At least I had an uninterrupted education!”

But getting back into things was still inevitably hard: “And I know it's the same for a lot of different people but I found the emergence quite baffling really. All the training that you had had and all the momentum that had filled your wings, it was just really difficult to pick it up again and I would say that it took a couple of years to get back. But actually now I'm much better off than I ever was. You think the typical graduate year is that you spend an awfully long time working in a pub, much more than you do acting. I know how to pull a pint like no one else can else! But actually in the past two years I have been really busy and I just feel so lucky that I have been brought back by Jordan Productions and I have got this to look forward to.”

In fact Lewes got his first taste of working in Eastbourne at the Devonshire Park around Easter time this year with the show The Little Mermaid: “And it was just great. It is such a beautiful theatre.”

Alongside panto, Lewes loves Shakespeare and insists they are closer than you might think: “I have done a lot of Shakespeare and I do think the two forms are closely linked. I think you've got to understand the format. Shakespeare was for the audiences to get involved in in a really bawdy way whereas in fact people tend to treat Shakespeare with a lot of reverence. But in fact the two audiences at Shakespeare and in panto really ought to be a lot closer than they are in their noisiness!”