Festive favourite ... The Flint Street Nativity at Liverpool Playhouse.
Panto season is the theatre critic's equivalent of receiving 15 pairs of socks. Last winter I saw three productions of The Wizard of Oz within two days (one was a matinee), which set a personal best for gorging on too many good things at once. At least they were all significantly different productions, even if one munchkin very quickly begins to look another.
Yet scanning the Christmas listings this year brings about a distinct feeling of deja vu. The Flint Street Nativity at Liverpool Playhouse - wasn't that on last year? The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at West Yorkshire Playhouse seems to have come round extremely quickly again. Even the Library theatre in Manchester - normally a good bet for original family shows - has fallen back on a version of Tom's Midnight Garden that it first produced three years ago. At least Birmingham Rep has come up with a new staging of Peter Pan, but it'll be on again in Leeds next year.
It's a common fact in the commercial sector that a pantomime isn't just for Christmas, it's for next Christmas and the one after that. Major pantomime corporations such as Qdos and First Family Entertainment (the hiss-and-boo wing of the Clear Channel media empire) make their money by mounting identikit shows, which shunt around the country's enormo-theatres picking up whichever celebrities are available en route. No one booking to see Mickey Rooney in Cinderella at the Sunderland Empire is likely to be bothered by the fact that it's probably the same one seen in Bristol with Russ Abbott.
The practice of subsidised theatres rescheduling productions from previous years is a new and rather disappointing development that perhaps makes financial sense for theatre administrators, but leaves you wondering if audiences are being short-changed. The usual tactic of marketing departments is to insist that a show has come "back by popular demand". Yet fine though Liverpool's Flint Street Nativity and West Yorkshire Playhouse's the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe both were, it's hard to imagine the public of Liverpool and Leeds absolutely insisting that their theatres do not give them anything new or equally enjoyable this year.
You could argue that opera productions come back round with predictable frequency, sometimes well beyond their natural expiry date. Yet the economics of opera production are very different. New productions are so costly to mount, and receive such a limited number of performances, that they have to be revived in successive seasons to have any chance of making their money back. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe has eight performances a week from early December to the middle of February. Add the current revival to the original run and the Playhouse will have been showing it for almost half a year.
There's a great pressure on theatres to succeed at Christmas, when many families make their only theatre visit of the year. The budget for Christmas shows can accordingly be close to the rest of the season put together, and come to resemble independent commercial enterprises with their own websites, trailers and dedicated marketing campaigns. But if the object is to impress the first-timers coming through the door, theatres can hardly expect to win their repeat custom by showing things that have already been seen before. Nor is it necessarily a safe financial bet to revive a show that has proved popular in the past. Last year Derby Playhouse - which has a record of producing excellent family shows - attempted to reduce its deficit by bringing back A Christmas Carol for a second year. Audience numbers plummeted and this year the theatre has gone into administration.
The irony is that Derby closed its doors the day after it mounted a lavish new musical version of Treasure Island. The show has thankfully been rescued for the remainder of its run as a new consortium fights to secure the long-term survival of the theatre. But I thoroughly recommend going to see it, not just to support a venue that needs all the audiences it can get, but because it is one of the few pieces of festive programming around which seems wholly fresh and original. Then again, that's always been the trouble when you want to watch something at Christmas. It's all repeats.
