Standing in the audience of the Southwark Playhouse’s Potted Panto, I am in Cinderella’s carriage, waving imaginary reins furiously with two dozen strangers. We all swerve to avoid a giant spider on a stick, but the water guns reach their target. Nothing in my career as a French critic has quite prepared me for the unlikely ride known as British pantomime, yet I might just be into it. I think.
Christmas in France, you may be surprised to learn, doesn’t involve cross-dressing dames or adults playing cows. Passable innuendo is expected from that relative who sided with Catherine Deneuve on men’s right to pester, but not from fairytale characters. When this newspaper came up with the idea of sending an unsuspecting foreigner to a series of pantos, I wondered how different it could really be from family-friendly entertainment elsewhere. Reader, it is very different.
I’m thankful I lost my panto virginity to Potted Panto, because in addition to action-packed immersion, Dan (Daniel Clarkson) and Jeff (Jefferson Turner) provided a helpful primer on the quirks of the genre. First of all, the repertoire – roughly six children’s stories, I learned – is ridiculously limited for a musical theatre form with no set text or songs. Grown adults are expected to yell at characters when there is something behind them while the actors pretend not to understand – a process my compatriots would describe as a “dialogue of the deaf”.
Add to that the high-pitched contributions of a hundred children to the other pantos I attended, Nottingham Playhouse’s Sleeping Beauty and Aladdin at the Theatre Royal Windsor, and you have what is known in French theatre parlance as a hostile environment. Across the Channel, adult and kids’ entertainment rarely overlap: on prestigious stages, even ballets such as The Nutcracker tend to come with sophisticated Freudian revisions.
Still, British ballet had prepared me somewhat for the experience. Many 20th-century classical dancers also performed in pantos, which inspired choreographers including Frederick Ashton: the characters of Widow Simone in La fille mal gardée and the Evil Sisters in his Cinderella owe much to pantomime dames. The genre – so quaint and episodic, an heir to the Italian commedia dell’arte and once popular in 19th-century France – is a fascinating example of survival in the face of the evolution of popular entertainment.
As theatrical offerings, the pantos I saw were winningly oblivious of their own absurdity. The stage designers embraced glitter as a rule, while directors made no attempt to smooth over any narrative deficiencies. In Kenneth Alan Taylor’s Sleeping Beauty, the Princess Rosalind, her Nurse Tilly Trott and Jerry the Jester somehow spend 21 years away from Rosalind’s parents (dream visitation arrangements for the children in the audience?). In Carole Todd’s staging of Aladdin, washing machines and the famous (I’m told) puppet Basil Brush, recast as the “Royal Bodyguard”, get more stage time than the Genie of the Lamp.
It does allow performers to go for broke in certain vignettes. I won’t soon forget Sleeping Beauty’s King Hubert and Queen Gertrude (Darren Southworth and Rebecca Little) getting their Grease on with You’re the One That I Want, dance moves included. Panto dames Kevin Cruise (Wishee-Washee) and Steven Blakeley (Widow Twankey) celebrated their 10th anniversary as a partnership in Windsor with a perfectly camp rendition of Dirty Dancing’s (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life. Helped by live musical accompaniment, songs such as Aladdin’s airborne City of Stars and Bruno Mars’s Marry You, repurposed in Sleeping Beauty, hit the sweet spot between story-related jukebox and seasonal entertainment.
So far, so amiably bonkers, but pantos also speak to British culture in less obvious ways. Only a country obsessed with royalty would have a fictional king cheerily addressing children in the audience as his “loyal subjects” and watch royal characters fixated on the wild idea that their offspring might marry a commoner. The Final Bow for Yellowface campaign currently gathering steam in the dance world may want to look at pantomimes, too: not to spoil the fun, but the Chinese caricatures that populate Aladdin are way past their sell-by date.
And then there are the topical jokes. While Sleeping Beauty was mostly free of them, Potted Panto and Aladdin leaned into them, often cleverly. When the Genie came out from a hundred-year time-out and asked if everyone was still talking about Brexit, the joke landed. Potted Panto’s duo even went hilariously off-script when a child suggested that Prince Charming die “farting on people’s faces”. “I’m not that sort of Royal,” the actor deadpanned.
Yet as a French viewer, I’ll confess to some unease over the recasting of politicians as comedy figures. While a Gallic equivalent of the satirical puppet show Spitting Image, Les Guignols, was for a long time extremely popular on TV, gentle parody in jolly holiday productions has a way of neutralising objectionable records. Sure, with his blond wig and refusal to say how many children he has, Potted Panto’s Dick Whittington is pretty funny, but where public policy is concerned, I’ll take angry debate over comic relief any day.
While Sleeping Beauty and Aladdin were full of warm, hearty performances, Potted Panto remained by far the most satisfying production, and not just because of the extended “oui-oui” joke delivered by a baguette-wielding Fairy Godchicken. It spreads the panto word with genuine affection, and just enough self-awareness to let outsiders in on the jokes. For them – huzzah.
Sleeping Beauty is at Nottingham Playhouse until 11 January. Potted Panto is at Southwark Playhouse, London, until 11 January. Aladdin is at Theatre Royal Windsor until 12 January
