I Went to Some Pantomimes and They're Still Weird

David Bedella and Matthew Kelly in Aladdin at the New Wimbledon Theatre (photo by Craig Sugden)

Each year between the start of December and the end of January, a tradition that’s as British as venturing abroad in search of gold and slaves is revived in theatres across the land. It’s pantomime season – a time for groans, laughter and the ceaseless shouting of tiny voices. This year, though, there was talk of change. It was reported that the panto dame was under threat and that only a tenth of 251 pantos had cast women as principal boys.

The Daily Mail cited political correctness but felt conflicted; after all, encouraging any form of cross-dressing is a bad thing, right? Famous cross-dresser Grayson Perry made a good point when he argued that the panto dame is a fortress that must be defended from the forces of commercialism and their championing of rigid gender roles. 'Panto is in trouble,' I thought. 'Oh no it isn’t,' I replied, to my brain. 'Oh yes it is,' said my brain, silently. 'Okay, well we’ll have to find out together then,' I said to my brain. 'We’ll have to go and see a couple of pantos.'

Many actors rely on pantos to keep them going through the year. As do many theatres. But, as important as they are for the industry, there’s no doubting how weird they are. One actor friend ran me through his various experiences in panto, including a production of Dick Whittington he did, in which he had to dance around in Wellington boots. The play was boycotted by the town because of an incident between the director and a young girl the year before, so the cast found themselves performing to eight people, twice a day, in a theatre that seats hundreds. Halfway through the run, the director disappeared. He’d been arrested on paedophilia charges.

Other friends who’d worked the circuit told me stories about having to tell children to shut up in character, about TV personalities with raging drinking problems and a man who pretended he was the first ever Doctor Who. I heard about freezing accommodation and salaries that got no higher than £350 a week. But I also heard about the feeling of camaraderie and about how, for excitement and good times, panto couldn’t be beaten.

Jack and the Beanstalk at the Southwark Playhouse

To get into this whole world, I headed first to the Southwark Playhouse in South London to see Goat and Monkey’s production of Jack and the Beanstalk. It was a matinee in the middle of the week and my friend Dan was with me, managing to partially offset the feeling of extreme creepiness I got from being a childless grown man watching a play for children, surrounded by children, in post-Yewtree Britain. Before going to a traditional panto with TV stars and big song and dance numbers, I wanted to see how a small, innovative company tackled panto. A theatre director friend had told me, "As far as I've heard, the Southwark Playhouse’s panto challenges the confines of the form blah blah blah." That seemed good enough to me.

She was right. It was a kind of post-modern thingy in which half the story related to the theatre company’s need to put on a successful show. It was a tale, as most pantos are, for hard times – except, in this production, the hard times were being experienced by both Jack (until he found his magic beans, at least) and the theatre company, who were down on their luck.

Jack and the Beanstalk at the Southwark Playhouse 

I thought it was alright. I mean, boring, but alright. That said, I’m not really the target audience, so at the interval I approached a group of girls from the local school. The conversation went like this:

Me: What do you guys think of the show?

Girl #1: My mum told me not to talk to strangers. [Laughter]

Me: That’s good advice, actually. Sorry.

Other groups were more forthcoming. One 14-year old said she thought it was "a bit childish". I'd never realised this before, but this is an opportunity panto allows every kid: the chance to show how grown-up and clever you are. Inside, you might be loving every minute of it, but outside you can affect the weary disdain of the jaded critic who’s seen it all. Besides, I could swear I saw her singing along with the Mariah Carey number they played at the beginning of the show and putting her hand up to volunteer to be the angry giant. Damn lying kid.

One family I met said they liked the show but that they wanted it to "get on with it" and start telling the story of Jack and the Beanstalk already. Panto is a form you mess with at your peril. It’s not Punchdrunk or You Me Bum Bum Train; the kids aren’t looking for an Iraq war allegory or a sly pastiche of Obamacare featuring seven dwarves. All the kids wanted to do was sing, shout, eat some sweets and occasionally feel as though they were really a little too old for this.

Jo Brand and Matthew Kelly in Aladdin (photo by Craig Sugden)

Having witnessed the valiant, creative side of panto, it was time to see the monstrous, corporate side of it. There are plenty of options out there for the part-time pantogoer whose viewing priorities include reality TV stars, TV presenters you thought were dead, alcoholics who’ve come “all the way from Hollywood” and fruity-voiced British thesps who, having played the Dane to great acclaim some time in the 60s, now find themselves having to do whatever they can to pay the rent. This season, you can go and see "the Hoff" in Nottingham, "the Fonz" in Richmond or "Nigel Havers" in Plymouth (actual video trailer here). I went to Wimbledon to see the debut of sarcastic panel-show regular Jo Brand and the return of one-time Stars in their Eyes presenter Matthew Kelly in the big bucks swashbuckler and quite-possibly-a-bit-racist version of Aladdin.

This time I was on my own, wallowing in my lurking creepiness and looking forward to the show. I’d been taken in by the trailer, which features glowing testimonies from a baffling array of figures, including Celebrity Big Brother contestant Sally Bercow, retired Welsh rugby player Gareth Thomas and TV presenter Eamonn Holmes. (This is the thing about panto, no one involved with it is so famous that their name alone is enough of a description.)

The show got off to an odd start, with a giant screen suspended in the middle of the stage playing adverts for Evian, charity appeals from Warwick Davis and promos for the DVD version of Shrek the Musical. This selection of treats was repeated twice, at a volume that blew the seniors at the back of auditorium from their seats.

Jo Brand twerking in Aladdin (photo by Craig Sugden)

One thing about pantos is that, no matter how predictable they have to be, it’s important to keep the references current or the kids just aren’t gonna know what you’re talking about. At the Southwark Playhouse, none of the kids I asked understood a scene that parodied Rocky, a film released in 1976. Wisely, Aladdin crammed some real "highlights of 2013" moments in, which meant the strange but somehow grimly inevitable sight of Jo Brand twerking, a timely crack about Mandela’s interpreter and a spirited version of "Get Lucky" led by a band of high-end session veterans.

It’s easy to be dismissive of panto and it’s often even easier to forget that it exists: this is a world that you are unlikely to be exposed to unless it's December and you have a kid or are a kid yourself. But I’ve spent a lot of time in theatres and – apart from hen-night special at the musical version of Dirty Dancing (people get very agitated by the prospect of Baby being put in the corner) – I’ve never seen an audience as excited by what they were seeing. The kids in the packed New Wimbledon Theatre were shouting and screaming and loving almost everything they saw. None of them knew who Jo Brand was, but they all thought she was hilarious. However, it was clear that they were really all there to see Flawless, the street dance troupe that got to the finals of Britain’s Got Talent in 2009. Flawless were playing a bodypopping police force and, fucking hell, kids love Flawless. When the lights went out and the dancers were illuminated only by LEDs attached to their costumes, the place basically exploded.

But it wasn’t all showstopping breakdancing. If you’re from any part of Asia, if you’re familiar with Edward Said’s critique of Western depictions of Middle Eastern and Asian cultures in his classic work Orientalism, or if you simply don’t think the idea of a Chinese guy being called "Pong" is that funny, you’re going to struggle a little with Aladdin. Maybe all the kids here can easily tell the difference between stereotype and reality, but it’s honestly hard to imagine this type of story or entertainment happening anywhere else in mainstream British culture these days. In a world of slickly corporate entertainment, the odd, camp, stupid, insulting world of panto seems like something worth holding on to. It’s resolutely un-snobbish and barely reconstructed, leaving it as one of the few parts of British culture beyond mockery. It mocks itself and thus it survives.

Follow Oscar on Twitter: @oscarrickettnow

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