David Olusoga’s Hidden Histories
The traditional British Christmas is not as British or as traditional as we often imagine. The Christmas tree is a relatively recent innovation: a German import, popularised in Britain during the 1840s by Prince Albert. The Christmas card is another Victorian invention, and turkey only caught on in the 20th century. Before that, goose was the traditional Christmas dish.
Another foreign import is pantomime. Its origins lie in the commedia dell’arte, the ‘comedy of the artists’, performed in Renaissance Italy by travelling street entertainers. The players wore masks and told tales through improvised sketches, slapstick comedy, singing and dancing. Their shows revolved around a number of stock characters: disreputable old men, young lovers, harlequins and clowns. The troupes of the commedia dell’arte travelled across Italy, from city to city, as well as to France and occasionally Elizabethan England, where they may well have influenced Shakespeare.
The ‘father’ of British pantomime was John Rich. As a young actor and theatre manager in the early 1700s, he saw the potential of adapting the commedia dell’arte for the English stage. Rich took the figure of the Harlequin and made him the central character in what was to become pantomime. Rich presented the first pantomime, soon to be known as a ‘harlequinade’, to audiences at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre in 1717. He himself played the role of the Harlequin, but partly because he didn’t have a good stage voice, Rich’s Harlequin told his stories through mime, acrobatics and stage trickery. His shows were so successful that they spawned a craze, and other theatre managers began to copy the formula.
At this stage, harlequinades were just short routines performed during the intervals or at the end of longer, more serious plays. Yet as John Rich’s productions became increasingly spectacular, they drew ever larger audiences and made him greater profits. But they also drew criticism. Opposition came from those who worried that this light foreign import posed a threat to proper theatre.
One critic was the actor David Garrick, who also managed the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane and was a business rival of John Rich. Although Garrick was dismissive of pantomime, he was well aware of its popularity, and was eager to ensure he did not miss out on the money that was to be made. “If they won’t come to Lear and Hamlet, I must give them Harlequin,” he once said.
Garrick found a way of having his cake and eating it. To keep theatregoers happy, he staged his own pantomimes, hiring a famous mime artist to play the Harlequin. But Garrick protected his reputation as the defender of serious theatre by only putting on pantomime at Christmas. In doing so, he established a link between pantomime and Christmas that has remained intact ever since.
The next stage in the evolution of the British pantomime came in 1800, when the performer Joseph Grimaldi took another of the stock characters from the commedia dell’arte, Pierrot the Clown, and adapted him for British audiences. Grimaldi’s clown had a painted face, with white cheeks and bright red lips. He was anarchic, disrespectful and irreverent, poking fun at everyone and everything. Grimaldi also gave his clown one of the classic features of British panto – a catchphrase: “Here we are again.” Grimaldi’s clown became an enormously popular character on the stage of Regency London, and set the template for the modern clown.
The commedia dell’arte’s transformation into the British panto was finally completed in the late Victorian era, when the music-hall star Dan Leno developed a new character: the Dame.