THE GOLDEN AGE OF PANTOMIME : SLAPSTICK, SPECTACLE AND SUBVERSION in Victorian England by Jeffrey Richards (I. B. Tauris £25) Often, I wonder what foreigners must think of us come Christmas time? The pantomime tradition is so wonderfully and eccentrically uniquely British. The daft catchphrases (‘It’s behind you!’; ‘Oh no it isn’t’; ‘Oh yes it is!’), the oo-err-missus vulgarity of frilly knickers and bras made of colanders, the ugly, old blokes playing women, the girls in tights playing chaps, the cows and horses, which are evidently two people in a silly costume. The whole thing is topsy-turvy and corny, and yet even illustrious thespians like Sir Ian McKellen can’t wait to show the public his Widow Twankey. I think he played Widow Twankey before he played King Lear, which gives you an idea of his priorities. Deliberately uncool, pantomime expresses our nutty national temperament . Deliberately uncool, pantomime expresses our nutty national temperament. As Richards says in this unnecessarily sombre tome, pantomime always revolved around slapstick, gender role reversal and topical allusion. The latter is what is lost to us — Victorian jokes about Captain Webb (the first person to swim the Channel) are on the obscure side now. The first thing Queen Victoria did after her Coronation in 1839 was visit the pantomime in Drury Lane, thus making the entertainment ‘one of the most popular exhibitions of our metropolis’, according to contemporary reports. The whole thing is topsy-turvy and corny, and yet even illustrious thespians like Sir Ian McKellen can’t wait to show the public his Widow Twankey . Later, there would be many Command Performances at Windsor Castle, culminating in 1941 when Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose starred in their own production of Cinderella, with the band of the Royal Horse Guards providing music. Panto in the 19th century soon belonged with ‘cards and carols, turkey and plum pudding, presents and family gatherings’ in the pantheon of a traditional Christmas. Dickens was besotted by the ‘poetry, the lights, the music, the smooth, stupendous changes of glittering and brilliant scenery’. There was much boisterous physical action deriving from the circus — brutal horseplay based on Punch and Judy puppets battering wives and beating babies. Joseph Grimaldi made fun of binge-drinking, gambling and knavery, ‘holding authority up to ridicule’ by picking pockets, or pilfering legs of mutton. Audiences grew hysterical if a policeman had his helmet knocked over his eyes — Chaplin perpetuated all this in his silent movies, and the anarchic links with music hall were to continue with the Goons, the Pythons and the Carry On team. I agree with Richards that a clown’s jokes are based on cruelty. I always much prefer the comic dame, a role played by male actors since Regency times. The performer is clearly a man dressed as an absurd and ugly woman. Les Dawson was a genius as Widow Twankey; today’s maestro is former Coronation Street actor Eric Potts, whose mountainous Sarah the Cook appears this year at the Bristol Hippodrome, co-starring with Britain’s Got Talent winners Ashleigh and Pudsey. Opposite the dame was always the Principal Boy, played by a lissom lass, ‘ample-bosomed, small-waisted and with thighs — oh, such thighs! — thighs that shone and glittered in different-coloured tights’. Steady on, professor! The Queen was always the Principal Boy in Windsor. But even as an impressionable child, I remember Anita Harris smacking her own rounded limbs with a riding crop and lamenting that she was already 50 miles from London and still there’d been ‘no sign of Dick’ — Dick Whittington, she meant. Bawdy innuendo was essential and, in Victorian days, as today (unless the politically-correct patrol have put a stop to it), everyone liked to see the chorus high-kicking and displaying ‘amber silk drawers’ or Union Jack knickers. Plots have always been based on classical myths, fairytales and legends: Robinson Crusoe, Aladdin and Dick Whittington have long been favourites, allowing ample scope for such stock characters as abominable uncles, misers, barons or bailiffs, wicked stepmothers, bankrupt widows, plus wholesome heroes and princes, who embark on quests or are set tests, winning through by using their wits and strength. Pantomime always revolved around slapstick, gender role reversal and topical allusion . They also utilise supernatural aid, represented by the genie of the lamp or a fairy godmother, roles taken today by the likes of Britt Ekland or Barbara Windsor. Indeed, TV veterans and movie has-beens often tread the boards at Christmas. Jerry Hall is a Wicked Witch in Richmond this season; David Hasselhoff is usually at large somewhere as Captain Hook. I once saw the elderly Anna Neagle waving a wand. As a child, I saw Bernard Bresslaw and Victor Spinetti giving their Abanazars, whipping up a storm of booing from the audience. I met the latter years later and told him he was a bigger ham than Laurence Olivier. Spinetti told me that when Olivier dressed up as Father Christmas for a National Theatre party, the tots present screamed with terror — Olivier played Santa as Richard III. Playing Widow Twankey in a pantomime has been a priority for many performers . The Victorians also mastered stage illusion, utilising magic lanterns, kaleidoscopes, gaslight and stained glass to create ‘elaborate mechanical effects’. Cinderella’s coach, complete with Shetland ponies, was always a set-piece, as was Aladdin’s treasure-cave. What audiences particularly applauded were the transformation scenes, when ‘the glitter of tinselled pasteboard’ turned swamps or the murk of London, before the spectators’ very eyes, into paradise gardens: ‘vistas of flowers and tall, crystal columns ranged in avenues’. This happens today — I’ve known Buttons and Prince Charming nip backstage for a fag break, so that the audience can don 3D specs and watch computerised sea-monsters swimming around in front of their faces. Pantos also utilise supernatural aid, represented by the genie of the lamp or a fairy godmother, roles taken today by the likes of Barbara Windsor . In the century before foreign travel, what panto provided on stage was a vision of abroad — fantasy foreign realms, ‘all the gorgeousness of the East’, which was fast becoming part of Victoria’s Empire. It didn’t come cheap. A Christmas panto might cost £6,000 (£680,000 in today’s money) to mount, though profits of £25,000 (£4.5 million today) could accrue. Eight hundred people were involved, on stage or behind the scenes, particularly troupes of children, dozens in each show, dancing and playing pixies, elves, squirrels, or monkeys. Incredible as it may sound, Richards says an estimated 10,000 children were employed during the pantomime season in London and up and down the country. Until Acts of Parliament in 1879, no particular thought was given to their welfare. Such moppets were never educated — indeed, they were maltreated, and the reformer Lord Shaftesbury thundered against the plight of ‘pantomime waifs’, who suffered ‘physically and morally for no purpose other than to administer to the pernicious amusement of the populace’. I’m old enough to remember celebrity dwarves and midgets like Wee Georgie Wood and Jimmy Clitheroe. I found them dead creepy, actually, yet in typically fascinating detail, Richards says the character of Tom Thumb was a Victorian hero, rather than outcast. Competitive auditions were fierce. The character would be obliged to fall in a honey pot, be carried off in a bag of gold, be devoured and disgorged by a cow, carried into the air by a crow, swallowed by a giant, found in a salmon, drowned in a punch-bowl, and ended up ‘at King Arthur’s court riding on a mouse.’ Beat that, Ashleigh and Pudsey.
Deliberately uncool, pantomime expresses our nutty national temperament .
The whole thing is topsy-turvy and corny .
Yet even illustrious thespians like Sir Ian McKellen can’t wait to show the public his Widow Twankey .
THE GOLDEN AGE OF PANTOMIME : SLAPSTICK, SPECTACLE AND SUBVERSION in Victorian England by Jeffrey Richards (I. B. Tauris £25) Often, I wonder what foreigners must think of us come Christmas time? The pantomime tradition is so wonderfully and eccentrically uniquely British. The daft catchphrases (‘It’s behind you!’; ‘Oh no it isn’t’; ‘Oh yes it is!’), the oo-err-missus vulgarity of frilly knickers and bras made of colanders, the ugly, old blokes playing women, the girls in tights playing chaps, the cows and horses, which are evidently two people in a silly costume. The whole thing is topsy-turvy and corny, and yet even illustrious thespians like Sir Ian McKellen can’t wait to show the public his Widow Twankey. I think he played Widow Twankey before he played King Lear, which gives you an idea of his priorities. Deliberately uncool, pantomime expresses our nutty national temperament . Deliberately uncool, pantomime expresses our nutty national temperament. As Richards says in this unnecessarily sombre tome, pantomime always revolved around slapstick, gender role reversal and topical allusion. The latter is what is lost to us — Victorian jokes about Captain Webb (the first person to swim the Channel) are on the obscure side now. The first thing Queen Victoria did after her Coronation in 1839 was visit the pantomime in Drury Lane, thus making the entertainment ‘one of the most popular exhibitions of our metropolis’, according to contemporary reports. The whole thing is topsy-turvy and corny, and yet even illustrious thespians like Sir Ian McKellen can’t wait to show the public his Widow Twankey . Later, there would be many Command Performances at Windsor Castle, culminating in 1941 when Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose starred in their own production of Cinderella, with the band of the Royal Horse Guards providing music. Panto in the 19th century soon belonged with ‘cards and carols, turkey and plum pudding, presents and family gatherings’ in the pantheon of a traditional Christmas. Dickens was besotted by the ‘poetry, the lights, the music, the smooth, stupendous changes of glittering and brilliant scenery’. There was much boisterous physical action deriving from the circus — brutal horseplay based on Punch and Judy puppets battering wives and beating babies. Joseph Grimaldi made fun of binge-drinking, gambling and knavery, ‘holding authority up to ridicule’ by picking pockets, or pilfering legs of mutton. Audiences grew hysterical if a policeman had his helmet knocked over his eyes — Chaplin perpetuated all this in his silent movies, and the anarchic links with music hall were to continue with the Goons, the Pythons and the Carry On team. I agree with Richards that a clown’s jokes are based on cruelty. I always much prefer the comic dame, a role played by male actors since Regency times. The performer is clearly a man dressed as an absurd and ugly woman. Les Dawson was a genius as Widow Twankey; today’s maestro is former Coronation Street actor Eric Potts, whose mountainous Sarah the Cook appears this year at the Bristol Hippodrome, co-starring with Britain’s Got Talent winners Ashleigh and Pudsey. Opposite the dame was always the Principal Boy, played by a lissom lass, ‘ample-bosomed, small-waisted and with thighs — oh, such thighs! — thighs that shone and glittered in different-coloured tights’. Steady on, professor! The Queen was always the Principal Boy in Windsor. But even as an impressionable child, I remember Anita Harris smacking her own rounded limbs with a riding crop and lamenting that she was already 50 miles from London and still there’d been ‘no sign of Dick’ — Dick Whittington, she meant. Bawdy innuendo was essential and, in Victorian days, as today (unless the politically-correct patrol have put a stop to it), everyone liked to see the chorus high-kicking and displaying ‘amber silk drawers’ or Union Jack knickers. Plots have always been based on classical myths, fairytales and legends: Robinson Crusoe, Aladdin and Dick Whittington have long been favourites, allowing ample scope for such stock characters as abominable uncles, misers, barons or bailiffs, wicked stepmothers, bankrupt widows, plus wholesome heroes and princes, who embark on quests or are set tests, winning through by using their wits and strength. Pantomime always revolved around slapstick, gender role reversal and topical allusion . They also utilise supernatural aid, represented by the genie of the lamp or a fairy godmother, roles taken today by the likes of Britt Ekland or Barbara Windsor. Indeed, TV veterans and movie has-beens often tread the boards at Christmas. Jerry Hall is a Wicked Witch in Richmond this season; David Hasselhoff is usually at large somewhere as Captain Hook. I once saw the elderly Anna Neagle waving a wand. As a child, I saw Bernard Bresslaw and Victor Spinetti giving their Abanazars, whipping up a storm of booing from the audience. I met the latter years later and told him he was a bigger ham than Laurence Olivier. Spinetti told me that when Olivier dressed up as Father Christmas for a National Theatre party, the tots present screamed with terror — Olivier played Santa as Richard III. Playing Widow Twankey in a pantomime has been a priority for many performers . The Victorians also mastered stage illusion, utilising magic lanterns, kaleidoscopes, gaslight and stained glass to create ‘elaborate mechanical effects’. Cinderella’s coach, complete with Shetland ponies, was always a set-piece, as was Aladdin’s treasure-cave. What audiences particularly applauded were the transformation scenes, when ‘the glitter of tinselled pasteboard’ turned swamps or the murk of London, before the spectators’ very eyes, into paradise gardens: ‘vistas of flowers and tall, crystal columns ranged in avenues’. This happens today — I’ve known Buttons and Prince Charming nip backstage for a fag break, so that the audience can don 3D specs and watch computerised sea-monsters swimming around in front of their faces. Pantos also utilise supernatural aid, represented by the genie of the lamp or a fairy godmother, roles taken today by the likes of Barbara Windsor . In the century before foreign travel, what panto provided on stage was a vision of abroad — fantasy foreign realms, ‘all the gorgeousness of the East’, which was fast becoming part of Victoria’s Empire. It didn’t come cheap. A Christmas panto might cost £6,000 (£680,000 in today’s money) to mount, though profits of £25,000 (£4.5 million today) could accrue. Eight hundred people were involved, on stage or behind the scenes, particularly troupes of children, dozens in each show, dancing and playing pixies, elves, squirrels, or monkeys. Incredible as it may sound, Richards says an estimated 10,000 children were employed during the pantomime season in London and up and down the country. Until Acts of Parliament in 1879, no particular thought was given to their welfare. Such moppets were never educated — indeed, they were maltreated, and the reformer Lord Shaftesbury thundered against the plight of ‘pantomime waifs’, who suffered ‘physically and morally for no purpose other than to administer to the pernicious amusement of the populace’. I’m old enough to remember celebrity dwarves and midgets like Wee Georgie Wood and Jimmy Clitheroe. I found them dead creepy, actually, yet in typically fascinating detail, Richards says the character of Tom Thumb was a Victorian hero, rather than outcast. Competitive auditions were fierce. The character would be obliged to fall in a honey pot, be carried off in a bag of gold, be devoured and disgorged by a cow, carried into the air by a crow, swallowed by a giant, found in a salmon, drowned in a punch-bowl, and ended up ‘at King Arthur’s court riding on a mouse.’ Beat that, Ashleigh and Pudsey.
costume. The whole thing is topsy-turvy and corny, and yet even illustrious thespians like uncool, pantomime expresses our nutty national temperament . Deliberately uncool, pantomime thespians like Sir Ian McKellen can’t wait to show the public his Widow Twankey . Later, there