Pantomime: what was I thinking?

In the lead up to Christmas, Shannon and I were talking about English Christmas traditions and wondering how many of them we could squeeze into December. Carols at Royal Albert Hall, outdoor ice-skating, markets, mulled wine and … pantomime. Now pantomime is something I know so little about that when colleagues talk about it I’ve learned to nod and smile. This after embarrassingly referring to the ‘dame’ character as a woman, only to be corrected that the ‘dame’ was always a man in drag. Du-uh (apparently everybody knows that.) After that, I called them ‘pantos’ for short to avoid further correction, since I wasn’t sure if it was a pantomiMe or a pantomiNe.

So, time to overcome my ignorance and sign up. It’s theatre, in one of the world’s culture capitals, so how bad could it be?

We started looking into shows, and therein lay another lesson. They’re performed at Christmas but they’re not about Christmas. We went to the Shaw Theatre to see Aladdin. Which was set in China. And starred a very large dame called Widow Twanky who looked like he was on day release from prison. Hmmm.

During the course of the performance, we were squirted with water pistols, forced to yell out and then yell out louder (I can’t hear you!), tell a character called Wishy Washy Wishy that ‘we all think you’re dishy’, boo the villain, cheer the hero, tell several people to ‘look out behind you’, and witness a fellow audience member being welcomed into the cross-dressing fold and forced to sing and dance in a tutu.

After thinking how odd all these things were I looked up pantomimes on Wikipedia. And whaddya know, it’s all there. The cross dressing, the audience participation, the sexual innuendo, even the scene where someone was shrunk in a washing machine then stretched out by an ironing press was textbook panto. Why didn’t I do my research before I booked?

The only convention they didn’t follow was this one: the cast often throws out sweets to the children in the audience. Apparently health and safety restrictions have done away with that particular tradition.

It was an eye opening experience. I have no regrets in having tried something new, and the company was great, with Shannon (who apparently knew what this was about and didn’t warn me) splitting her attention between the stage and the increasingly baffled expression on my face.

But it could have been worse.  I could have been seeing Aladdin at the New Wimbledon Theatre. Starring none other than… Pamela Anderson.