PANTO TIME
IN THIS HIGHBROW RETROSPECTIVE OF PANTOMIME, WE PROMISED TO STEER CLEAR OF SILLINESS, DODGY PUNS AND BAD JOKES… OH NO WE DIDN’T!
Boys and girls, in the spirit of Christmas, season of joy, mirth and boxes of Maltesers enjoyed on tippy-uppy velvet seats, please welcome The Simple Things Fairy (and she really is rather simple) to take you on a whirlwind tour of pantomime from its earliest inception to its happily ever after (sound of magic wand, stage left)…
The word pantomime means ‘all kinds of mime’ and panto originates from all kinds of roots. But it’s in 16th-century Italy, with the
Commedia dell’arte that our story begins. The commedia featured well worn parts, like panto: Columbine the girl, Pierrot the clown, and Harlequin the servant, famously played by clown Joseph Grimaldi in the late 17th century. And many aspects of the commedia can be seen in panto still.
Jim Davis, professor of Theatre Studies at Warwick University, explains: “In commedia, gags were called lazzi and were inserted into the performances just as gags are inserted into pantomime today. Commedia was improvised – panto today is still often ad-libbed, so the commedia lives on.”
By the 17th century, the commedias were packing bums onto seats in England, where they morphed into the Harlequinades. Over time, other tales were performed alongside. They’d begin with an opener – a well known story – and, at some point, the characters would ‘un-mask’ to reveal they were in fact the Harlequinade.
VICTORIAN FANCIES
These ‘openers’ became the main part of the act and by Victorian times the Harlequinade fell by the wayside. It was the Victorians who made the pantomime we love now. Please give three cheers, boys and girls, for Cathy Haill, curator of popular entertainment at the V& A, London: “Panto as we know it is a late 19th century emanation,” she says. “It’s been kept alive through change and that is its joy and its glory.”
The Victorians took their panto stories from fairytale, so we see Cinderella and Jack and the
Beanstalk. The Arabian Nights also provided a »
“Panto as we know it has been kept alive through change and that is its joy and its glory”
“True panto stars are skilled in voice, physical comedy, choreography and comic timing”
rich source from Aladdin to the Forty Thieves (and that’s just the box office – have you seen the prices of panto recently?).
The Victorians’ fascination with fairies gave us ‘good fairies’ and magical ‘transformations’, during which a pumpkin, for example, would metamorphose into a coach in magical style with incredible scenery changes and spectacle. “These transformation scenes had hundreds of people on stage. Some were dummies, held by two people either side, to swell the numbers,” says Cathy, painting a picture that would make the average modern production of
Les Mis look like an infant school nativity. And as well as being lavish, they were long. And when we say long… “Some went on for five hours,” Cathy says. “There’s an anecdote about a man coming out of one panto and asking, ‘ What’s the time?’ and another quipping, ‘ What’s the year?’”
Simultaneously, music hall was changing the tone, bringing in ribald humour and topical jokes. The railway lines were the butt of most Victorian panto gags. Plus ça
change… We expect many a passenger of Southern and Great Northern will be cracking a smile (through the tears) at the same jokes this Christmas.
And of course, “You begin to get the character of the dame more fixed, as well as the principal boy ( played by a girl),” says Cathy. In fact, the popularity of panto in this era may be attributed to the opportunity it afforded the everyday Victorian chap for an eyeful of female ankle in tights. Pass the smelling salts.
AIN’T NOTHING LIKE A DAME
Dames later started to arrive from music hall, with variety performers and, by the 1940s, household names like Arthur Askey (of “I thang yaw” fame) played the part. There were always big shoes ( literally) to fill. For a while, in the 1970s and 80s, you may, in many provincial theatres, have seen a Z-list celebrity donning a frock. At one point, it was a running joke that if a once-famous actor on their uppers was cast as dame, he would ask the audience: “Where’s my career?” to the
raucous reply: “It’s behind you!”
But the noughties saw a revival, with Ian McKellen stepping out as Widow Twankey at the Old Vic, to almost universal joy. A reviewer opined: “He put me in mind of an over-excited Hilda Ogden on a trip to the Blackpool illuminations, his homely Lancashire voice delivering saucy one-liners with lubricious relish.” What could be lovelier? People who ‘get’ panto understand you can’t just wander off the set of Hollyoaks into a dame costume and expect rapturous applause (though many have tried). True panto stars are specialist artists with tremendous skills in voice, physical comedy, choreography and comic timing, not to mention a magical rapport with the audience.
Because most of all, panto is about our relationship with it. We all remember our first panto: “Mother Goose at the Bristol Hippodrome in the 1950s,” says Jim Davis. And we all have a favourite… “Cinderella. I don’t care what Keira Knightley* says,” insists Cathy Haill. “What most pantos once had, and this still has, is the transformation scene. That moment of magical surprise, right before your eyes.”
So whither next for pantomime? “I’ve seen some pantos where the audience wear 3D glasses!” says Cathy. Certainly, pantomime’s topicality manages to keep it fresh. “It owes its existence to its ability to re-invent itself,” agrees Jim. Perhaps most of all it’s that magical mixture of old and new that does it for us. You know what you’re getting with panto, and you always know it will be enormously jolly fun.