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An Apology for Panto? No Way!Dateline: 12th December, 2005Panto time again! Since the beginning of December pantos throughout the country have been opening. Outside of London, you'd be hard-pressed to find a theatre without a panto - and 99% of those you do come across will have a child-friendly Christmas show of some kind. And it's not just professional theatres: amateur companies, youth theatres, dance schools, community centres, schools, will all be presenting their Christmas shows and the majority will be pantos or pantomime-influenced. And so it will remain until the second week of January at the earliest. Indeed, there are a lot of amateur pantos which don't begin until January - there are even some which open in February. So for three months you'll find pantos everywhere throughout the United Kingdom - but nowhere else. No, that's not quite true: wherever there's a significant Brit ex-pat community, you'll find a panto of some sort, even if it's just a few friends getting together to do a panto "for a laugh". It's very much a British thing. In fact, panto is the only theatrical form which was invented in Britain and, as we know it now, has been a part of the British Christmas since at least the latter half of the ninteenth century. As the august GBS once wrote, "A child who has not seen a pantomime is a public danger"! Its popularity is undimmed. Theatres both professional and amateur rely on a successful panto to see them through the year financially. Theatres large and small, which for the rest of the year might feel happy with a 60% house, consider 90% for the panto poor! Like the British people who gave birth to it, panto is very much a hybrid. It grew out of the "Italian Nights Scenes" which were brought to London by French companies as early as the 1670. These were a rather more sophisticated version of the Italian Commedia dell'Arte (which had, in fact, been seen in London a century before but without making as much impression). The Commedia almost certainly goes back to the "Fabulae Atellanae", which in turn owed something to the Roman comedies of Plautus (251 - 184 BC) and Terence (190 - 150 BC). They, in turn, owed much to the Greek New Comedy of Menander. Starting to get the picture? But the Brits changed the Italian Night Scenes to suit themselves, and influences from the Moralitand Mummers plays were felt. As the years passed other influences came to bear on the fledgling panto, one of the most important being the court masques of which James I was so fond. By the end of the nineteenth century pantomime much as we know it was well-established and the complaints started. Hands were thrown up in horror and the end of panto prophesied when stars of the Music Hall like Marie Lloyd, Lottie Collins, Little Tich and Harry Lauder began to appear. A similar reaction followed when Arthur Collins, manager of Drury Lane, introduced stars of musical comedy in 1912. Then in the 1960s there was a similar outcry about the use of pop stars like Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard (who played Aladdin at the London Palladium in 1969, along with The Shadows who played Wishee, Washee, Noshee and Poshee!). Then it was Gladiators, soap stars (initially Australian, but then British too), sportsmen (Frank Bruno, Ian Botham), page three girls (Melinda Messenger) (keeping their clothes on!) and by the start of this century even (failed) politicians got into the act when Neil and Christine Hamilton appeared in panto at Guildford! Now, of course, an appearance on Big Brother is enough to secure an invitation to appear in panto somewhere! In the twentieth century some very highly esteemed "legit" actors graced the panto stage, including no less a personage than Dame Anna Neagle (as the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella at the Palladium in 1985) and film star Jean Kent. Other actors who have appeared with great success in panto include Sir Henry Irving, Edward Woodward, John Nettles and - of course! - Sir Ian McKellen, Roger Allam, Maureen Lipman and a host of others. Panto is a hugely eclectic theatrical form, absorbing into itself influences from anywhere and everywhere, and if you go to a panto this year you'll see the most modern technology (digital imaging and intelligent lights) alongside comic routines and characters that go back many hundreds of years. You don't believe it? Ask yourself where the Dame came from. "Her" progenitor (progenitress?) is the Betty of the Morris Dancers! Female principal boy? Peg Woffinton played the "breeches part" of Sir Henry Wildair in Farquhar's The Constant Couple in 1740. And don't forget Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro. And the Buttons comic servant part goes back, through the Harlequin of the Commedia, all the way to Plautus! But the reason panto is still so popular is its predictability: we know Cinders will go to the ball and marry the Prince, that Aladdin will defeat Abanazar and marry the Princess, that Dick will survive the attacks of King Rat, become wealthy and marry Alice. And we'll recognise the jokes: they are brave Ugly Ssisters who do not say "I can't get my foot in the crystal slipper", to which the reply is "You couldn't get your foot in the Crystal Palace!" And a panto without a "slosh" scene is unthinkable. We know just what we're going to get, and we know we're going to be able to let our hair down and shout and scream at the villain, cheer the hero, and yell "Oh no it isn't!" Apologia pro genere pantomimica? It doesn't need it. It's as popular as ever. It will change in the future, of course, but it will remain essentially the same, and I suspect that in fifty years' time out grandchildren's grandchildren will be jum,ping up and down screaming "It's behind you!"
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