What the nation needs now - pantomime!
Apparently, the government is going to be turning the spotlight onto the world of entertainment this week. They are set to publish their plans for helping the theatre industry. Good on them: every little helps. But the truth is there is only one real answer: curtain up! And sooner rather than later. This week super-producer Cameron Mackintosh announced that his big shows won’t be up and running again until next year – March in all probability. As far as I’m concerned, that’s too late. We need all our theatres open in time for Christmas – this Christmas. Why? Because Christmas is panto time and if panto goes, it’s game over. We can throw in the towel: the pandemic will have won. Truly. A British Christmas isn’t Christmas without a Christmas pantomime.
Christmas pantomime as we know it is a British phenomenon. Originally rooted in the Italian tradition of commedia dell’ arte, it has evolved over two hundred and fifty years into an entertainment you won’t find anywhere else in the world – other than parts of the old Empire. Yes, they still do panto in South Africa and Jamaica, in Canada and Australia, but essentially pantomime is now our nation’s only unique contribution to world culture.
Ballet, opera, circus, theatre – they happen everywhere. Only we do panto. And how! Under normal circumstances, Christmas is the one time in the year when every theatre in the British Isles is guaranteed to make money as we flock, in our millions, old and young, frail and hearty, to cheer and sigh, boo and hiss, at a theatrical extravaganza that combines a classic children’s fairy tale with music, slapstick and melodrama, and peoples it with men dressed as women, women dressed as men and humans disguised as animals. It’s both ridiculous and wonderful.
Panto works because it has something in it for everyone. Modern pantomime took shape in Victorian times when music-hall entertainers (the TV stars of their day) were brought in to be the show’s top-liners. The idea of the principal boy being played by a woman was very much to let the audience enjoy the sight of her legs in tights. The notion of the middle-aged male comic dressing up as the pantomime dame was to give the character freedom to play the part for raucous laughs. In the 1890s, when Dan Leno and Marie Lloyd – the Jack Whitehall and Adele of their day – appeared in panto, they brought a whiff of the music-hall with them, but they never lost sight of the fact that pantomime is a gloriously innocent entertainment that the whole family can enjoy. For many children, it’s their first introduction to the magical world of theatre. And now, unless we can make the new normal pretty much like the old normal, it’s under threat.
Panto has been part of my life since 1960 when I first saw Cinderella at the Streatham Hill Theatre in London, with Frankie Howerd as an outrageous Buttons. In 1968, as a student, I directed my own production of Cinderella and Eliza Mannigham-Buller (later the head of MI5) played the Fairy Queen. We took our show to the Nuffield Theatre, Southampton – a theatre that has been driven into administration by the economic consequences of the Covid crisis. If theatres can’t open properly by December, scores more will go to the wall. Thriving theatres, large and small, are the life-blood of a community and panto is the best kind of communal experience I know.
The last time I appeared in panto professionally, I was Baron Hardup, Bonnie Langford was Cinders and the great Barbara Windsor was Fairy Queen. Whether you are on stage or in the audience, there is nothing quite like it. It’s the one form of family entertainment that brings everyone together. It’s exactly what our nation needs now. Oh yes it is!