The Christmas Pantomime colour
lithograph bookcover, 1890
Pantomime (informally, panto), not to be confused with mime, refers to a
theatrical genre, traditionally found in Great Britain, Canada, Australia, South Africa,
New Zealand and Ireland, which is usually performed around
the Christmas and New Year holiday season.
History
The style and content of modern pantomime has very clear and strong links with the Commedia dell'arte, a form of popular theatre that arose in Italy in the early middle ages, and which
reached England by the 16th century. A "comedy of professional artists" traveling from province to province in Italy and then
France, they improvised and told stories which told lessons to the crowd and changed the main character depending on where they
were performing. The great clown Grimaldi transformed the format. Each story had the
same fixed characters: the lovers, father, servants (one being crafty and the other stupid), etc. These roles/characters can be
found in today's pantomimes.
The gender role reversal resembles the old festival of Twelfth Night, a combination of Epiphany and
midwinter feast, when it was customary for the natural order of things to be reversed. This tradition can be traced back to
pre-Christian European festivals such as Samhain and Saturnalia.
In Restoration England, a pantomime was considered a low form of opera, rather like the Commedia dell'arte but without Harlequin (rather like
the French Vaudeville). In 1717, actor and manager
John Rich introduced Harlequin to the British stage under the name of "Lun" (for
"lunatic") and began performing wildly popular pantomimes. These pantomimes gradually became more topical and comic, often
involving as many special theatrical effects as possible. Colley Cibber and his colleagues
competed with Rich and produced their own pantomimes, and pantomime was a substantial (if decried) subgenre in Augustan drama. This form had virtually died out by the end of the 19th century.
Until the 20th century, British pantomimes were often concluded with a harlequinade, a
free standing entertainment of slapstick.
Pantomime traditions and conventions
Traditionally performed at Christmas, with family audiences consisting mainly of children
and parents, British pantomime is now a popular form of theatre, incorporating song,
dance, buffoonery, slapstick, in-jokes, audience participation and mild sexual innuendo. Plots are often loosely based on
traditional children's stories, the most popular titles being:
The form has a number of conventions, some of which have changed or weakened a little over the years.
- The leading male juvenile character (the "principal boy") - almost always played by a
young woman.
- An older woman (the pantomime dame - often the hero's mother) is usually played by a
man in drag.
- Risqué double entendre, often wringing innuendo out of perfectly innocent phrases.
This is in theory over the heads of the children in the audience.
- Audience participation, including calls of "look behind you!" (or "he's behind you!"), and
"oh yes it is!" or "oh no it isn't!" The audience is always encouraged to "boo" the villain.
- A song combining a well-known tune with re-written lyrics. The audience is encouraged
to sing the song; often one half of the audience is challenged to sing "their" chorus louder than the other half.
- The pantomime horse or cow, played by two actors in a single costume, one as the
head and front legs, the other as the body and back legs.
- The good fairy always enters from the right side of the stage and the evil villain enters from the left. In Commedia Dell
'Arte the right side of the stage symbolized Heaven and the left side symbolized Hell.
- The members of the cast throw out sweets to the children in the audience.
Guest celebrity in pantomime
Another contemporary pantomime tradition is the celebrity guest star, a practice that dates back to the late 19th century,
when Augustus Harris, proprietor of the Theatre Royal,
Drury Lane, hired well-known variety artists for his pantomimes.
Until the decline of the British music hall tradition by the late 1950s, many popular
artists played in pantomimes across the country. Many modern pantomimes use popular artists to promote the pantomime, and the
play is often adapted to allow the star to showcase their well-known act, even when such a spot has little relation to the plot,
for example, Rolf Harris might perform Jake the Peg in
a pantomime about Aladdin.
Nowadays, a pantomime occasionally pulls off a coup by engaging a guest star with an unquestionable thespian reputation, as
was the case with the Christmas 2004 production of Aladdin that featured Sir Ian
McKellen as Widow Twankey, which he reprised in the 2005 production at the
Old Vic theatre in London.
As well as being an actor in the Shakespearean tradition, McKellen had become hugely
famous with children as Gandalf in The
Lord of the Rings and Magneto in X-Men. "At least we can tell our grandchildren that we saw McKellen's Twankey and it was huge," said
Michael Billington, theatre critic of The
Guardian, December 20, 2004, entering into the
pantomime spirit of double entendre. In recent times, the in pantomimes have featured soap stars, comedians or former sportsmen rather as celebrity attractions, supplemented by jobbing actors and
pantomime specialists.
One of the most popular and critically acclaimed (not to mention commercially successful) pantomimes in recent years has been
the one at the York Theatre Royal. It features no guest celebrities, but rather a regular cast
headed by Berwick Kaler, who has played the dame there for 27 years and has built up a
devoted fan-base. Kaler has been credited with reviving a dying tradition. Tickets go on sale April 1; in 2005 the first buyer
turned up at 3am. Well before the opening they had sold 30,000 of the 50,000 seats, something that many celebrity-centred
pantomimes could only dream of. In a 2004 interview, Kaler said:
- "The panto has been said to be dying for years. Well, some of them deserve to die. These are the ones that flout tradition by
casting a young man as principal boy, or by diminishing the role of the dame, sometimes writing her out altogether. Having cast
clapped-out TV stars to draw the audiences, these pseudo-pantos make no further effort. They just don't try. I dive into a tank
of water every year. Who wants to do that?" [1]
Pantomime in Australia
Pantomimes in Australia at Christmas have also always been very popular, and professional productions often feature
celebrities. During the 1950s, a Christmas Cinderella pantomime in Sydney featured
Danny Kaye as Buttons. There are also radio
pantomimes at Christmas which are featured on the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation.
Pantomime in Canada
Pantomime in the United States
Pantomime, as described in this article is seldom performed in the United States of
America. As a consequence, the word "pantomime" is more commonly understood to refer to the art of mime, as was practised by Marcel Marceau or Mummenschanz and is often assumed to be a solo performance seen as
often on street corners as on stage. However, certain shows that came from the pantomime
traditions, especially Peter Pan, are performed quite often and there are a few American theater companies who produce
traditional British-style pantomime as well as American adaptations of the form.
Pantomime in the United Kingdom
The Pantomime first arrived in England as entr'actes between opera pieces, eventually
evolving into separate shows. The Lincoln's Inn Field Theatre and the Drury Lane
Theatre were the first to stage pantomimes, creating high competition between them to create the more elaborate show. As
manager of Drury Lane in the 1870s, Augustus Harris is now considered the father of
modern pantomime. The New Wimbledon Theatre in London is considered to be the "home of London pantomime".[citation needed]
Many city and provincial theatres have an annual pantomime.
Pantomime is very popular with Amateur Dramatics societies throughout the
UK, and the Pantomime season (roughly speaking, December to February) will see pantomime
productions in many village halls and similar venues across the country.
External links
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