Pantomime as we know it, is nearly 200 years old, and yet is still alive and well in humble halls and top theatres across the United Kingdom. It’s a curious British art from that just refuses to die.
Image courtesy of LollyKnit
It’s pantomime season again. “No it isn’t! Yes it is! No it isn’t! Yes it is!” And although we all know the stories backwards, hordes of theatregoers (as well as those who would never darken a proscenium arch at any other time of year) will watch in delight to see if Aladdin will get out of Ali Baba’s cave or if Snow White will be cured of her narcolepsy.
Job creation for B Grade celebs?
What is it about this curiously British theatre convention that refuses to die? Cynics would say that it is kept alive simply to prolong the careers of B Grade British celebs who in any sane world would have been able to slip mercifully into oblivion, but it’s deeper than that, much, much deeper.
Pantomime – which comes from the Greek for ‘an imitator of things’ – originally meant a performer (as it still does in America where Vaudeville became the dominant populist theatre form). But in Great Britain it refers to a theatrical convention that became popular in the 19th Century where women play the leading male, men play the comic Dame and bad jokes are de rigueur.
Slapstick humour
Affectionately known as ‘Panto’, it is a mixture of Fairy Story, spectacle, song, dance, topical humour, satire, slapstick and double entendre, with the audience playing an indispensable role, much like the chorus in ancient Greek theatre. There are stock roles, stock dialogue and stock comic routines, some of which the audience know better than the actors: ‘It’s behind you!’ and ‘Fee Fi Fo Fum’ have been screamed with glee by children for nearly 200 years.
Commedia del Arte
The Commedia travelled from Italy to France (Harlequin was reborn as Pierot) and then across the channel to England, where ‘Harlequinades’ became popular in Elizabethan theatres.
Music hall
By Victorian times, Music Hall had become the most popular of all theatre genres with its earthy humour, toe-tapping tunes and subversive digs at the upper classes. It was only a matter of time before cross-pollination between the traditional Harlequinades and the new style of musical theatre took place and pantomime, as we know it today, was born.
Fairy tales and Roman romps
By the turn of the 19th Century, the Harlequinades had adopted Fairy Stories as their plots and the now familiar pantomimes of Aladdin (1813), Dick Whittington (1814), Jack and the Beanstalk (1819) and Cinderella (1820), took on much of the form they still have today.
But the roots of pantomime can be found even earlier than this, harking back to the Saturnalia festivities of Rome, when, on what has now become Christmas Day, the members of leading households would switch roles for a day and sometimes put on a play. The master became the servant, the servant the master, men women and women men.
Mystery plays and women’s rights
Ironically enough, there are even traces of it in the mediaeval Mystery plays – used to teach Bible stories to a largely illiterate population – where Mrs Noah was very much a ‘dame’. In Elizabethan and early Jacobean theatre, men of course always played women, but after the 17th Century Restoration, when women were first allowed onto the stage, the comic elderly woman was still played by a man. This could also be attributed to the fact that many ageing actresses refused to play older women – ah yes, vanity, thy name is indeed woman!
Slap those thighs!
But lust, thy name is man! The curious convention of having a young woman play the heroic male lead can be attributed to Victorian gentlemen producers trying to get around the pervading censorship of women’s legs. An actress dressed as a woman would not be able to show her ankles, but an actress dressed as a man could show the full length of the offending limbs and heartily slap her thighs to bring attention to them.
By the 1950s the tradition of women playing the leading man was dying out, with Norman Wisdom famously playing Aladdin at the London Palladium in 1957. However, it is thanks to leggy Cilla Black who played the role in 1971, that women started gaining ground again. Nowadays, the lead male role can he played by men or women.
Crowd pleasers
The convention of bringing in celebrities from other fields is not an invention of the media-conscious 21st Century – Victorian producers knew all about marketability without ever having heard the word. Sporting heroes or existing stars of the Music Hall were guaranteed to draw the crowds, and allowing them stage time to showcase their latest songs was considered a small price to pay. Hence, the convention of using contemporary songs was born. During performance, the Music Hall artistes often changed the style of pantomime plots and even the dialogue, by inserting some of their own well-rehearsed routines – as long as they drew the crowds, the producers didn’t mind.
Everyone’s a critic
But not everyone was happy. In 1882, pantomime aficionado W. Davenport Adams decried: “Now to what do we owe this unfortunate, nay painful feature of pantomime performances? I fear there can be but one answer to the question: we owe it to the Music Hall element among the performers. Why must there always be a woman dressed in tights? Why must the comic woman always be a man? Have we not plenty of youthful premiers and female comedians?”
Sadly Mr Adams missed the point. These are the very things that make pantomime. It is what the audience has come to expect and shrewd producers of every generation know that what the audience wants, the audience gets.
Adapt or die
But how can an art form that is shackled to the past still cut it with modern audiences? The answer lies in the melding of the old and the new, the comfortingly familiar and the surprisingly contemporary. Children go to pantomimes to enjoy the spectacle and the Fairy Tale; grown-ups go to see how clever the performers will be in bringing in the latest current affairs and gossip. It is never politically correct, it is never artistically pretentious; it is theatre for the people, by the people and at the expense of people.
In the 1860s it was rumoured that ex-prime minister Lord Palmerston died in the arms of a chambermaid after spending himself on a billiard table; in 2005 it was revealed that arch Labour activist and Home Secretary David Blunket spent many a night in the arms of an American publisher. Both are script material, and whether it is Snow White or Cinderella, it is bound to get in.
This is how pantomime has survived: it links us to our past and our present at the same time, and in years to come, will link us to future generations. And that’s all there is to say!
First published in Realm Magazine, December 2005.
Welcome to my site - I'm Fiona Veitch Smith, a freelance journalist, author, playwright and writing teacher. This site contains thoughts and articles I've written on a range of topics. I hope you find them useful.
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