{"id":4973,"date":"2016-11-02T18:23:07","date_gmt":"2016-11-02T18:23:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.city-academy.com\/news\/?p=4973"},"modified":"2018-03-14T16:06:47","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T16:06:47","slug":"5-things-didnt-know-about-panto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.city-academy.com\/news\/5-things-didnt-know-about-panto\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Things You Didn’t Know About Panto"},"content":{"rendered":"

The British stage has always welcomed pantomime, taking pride and ownership over these cross-dressing, pun-tacular, singalongs that we\u2019ve created into an art form all of our own and that doesn\u2019t seemingly\u00a0exist anywhere else. For those who don\u2019t quite feel the appeal, this article identifies some of the lesser known tropes of panto and digs out some genuinely fascinating facts from its costume box of history…<\/strong><\/p>\n

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1. Technically, it actually isn\u2019t a British thing<\/h4>\n

\"pantoWhile modern panto is certainly homegrown and quintessentially British, in the classical sense pantomime is very much a Roman thing, developed from the commedia dell’arte<\/em> tradition of Italy: a 16th century style of street performance with sketches featuring masked characters. These comic improvs were reproduced in England as mimes known as Harlequinades, which along with the masque and music hall genres, form the basis for the magical visual (and now verbal) spectacles we see today.<\/p>\n

In the USA, pantomime does in fact refer\u00a0to the silent art of miming, but the word actually comes from the Latin pantomimus<\/em>, which in turn comes from Greek\u2019s pantomimos. Panto meant \u2018all\u2019 and mimos alluded to a dancer who would play\u00a0all the roles of a story. Though nothing is known of the art form before commedia dell’arte<\/em>, but they did pay homage by basing many of their pantomimes on ancient Greek tragedies.<\/p>\n

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2. It may be part of our heritage, but we\u2019re lucky to still have pantomime<\/h4>\n

\"musicalTowards the end of the 1970s, the Christmas season nearly lost a beloved household tradition when pantomime almost died. Subsidised theatres stopped hedging their bets as pantos got a bad rap for amateur dramatics and poor \u2018closing credits\u2019.<\/p>\n

However, especially in the last decade, the peculiar art form has been resuscitated and reborn. Thanks to an injection of time, energy and money, better-written scripts increasingly lure in hot talents and big names.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is not the first time panto has been made all shiny and new either – the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane cast illustrious performing artistes in 19th century pantomimes, which proved popular. It\u2019s the sort of theatre that offers actors a treasure chest of material, some good old fashioned fun, and a promise to test their dexterity: incorporating song, dance, buffoonery, and of course, the challenge of balancing\u00a0family\u00a0friendly with\u00a0sexual innuendo.<\/p>\n

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3. That brings us to the next point: Panto does attract talent<\/h4>\n

\"pantomime\u201cPanto has everything theatrical \u2013 song, dance, verse, slapstick, soliloquy, audience participation, spectacle, cross-dressing and a good plot, strong on morality and romance. What more could you want for a family outing?\u201d Sir Ian McKellen hit the nail on the head and brought a much needed revival to pantomime when he played Widow Twankey in\u00a0the Old Vic\u2019s adaptation of Aladdin from 2004-2006, showing off his range to the fullest when he made his entrance in rouge with headgear in tow. \u2018Oh no he didn\u2019t!\u2019 Oh yes he did.<\/p>\n

He teamed up with award-winning director Sean Mathias for that, and Sean stands in the good company of renowned children\u2019s author Philip Pullman, who wrote his own version of Aladdin for the Bristol Old Vic. Aside from soap stars and local radio DJs, this lowly lot also represent the British circuit; Stephen Fry; another Lord of the Rings actor and voice actor, John Rhys-Davies; BAFTA-winning writer, actress and comedian Jo Brand; Olivier Award-winning actor and presenter Matthew Kelly; actor, musician, writer, theatre director and CBE Simon Callow; actor, theatre director, broadcaster and OBE Richard Wilson; and three-time Emmy Award-winning actress and OBE Susan Hampshire OBE – to name a few.<\/p>\n

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4. Pantomime exists outside of the UK too<\/h4>\n

\"beAccording to Sir Ian McKellen, the artistic director of the Old Vic and famed American actor Kevin Spacey was at first “deeply bewildered” by pantomime, and in response\u00a0he beautifully summarised why theatre of the ‘daring and daft’ kind caught the British imagination:<\/p>\n

“So many disparate elements of theatre are on display…often stretching back to Shakespeare and the origins of Western theatre tradition and yet unique to Britain.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sir Ian’s right of course,\u00a0in most senses. If we are pedantic about it though,\u00a0pantos actually aren’t unique to Britain and do exist in countries outside of the UK. There’s New Zealand, Canada and Australia and even South Africa, though to be fair they’ve all been under\u00a0British rule at some point. Jamaica makes for an interesting case study\u00a0– there, the genre is combined\u00a0with local ‘Anansi’ folklore, which revolves around\u00a0a single character that’s pivotal to West African and Caribbean storytelling, thereby\u00a0following the unspoken commandment of panto to\u00a0adapt to a performance’s\u00a0real time location and crowd. Then there is the anomaly of America, where the last decade or so has seen them attempt to export the product and\u00a0imitate\u00a0the industry that exists here.<\/span><\/p>\n

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5. There\u2019s more to it than\u00a0first meets the eye<\/h4>\n

\"cityWe\u2019ve all heard about the singalongs, the special effects, the unrelated subplots and the adorably predictable \u2018He\u2019s behind you!\u2019 audience participation – however there are some mechanisms of panto that aren\u2019t that obvious. <\/span>For example, while pantos are stories of ‘love wins the day’ and villains being redeemed, there is a general rule of thumb that the hero will enter from stage-right and the villain from stage-left. Also, a man in matronly drag spreading giggles and face-palms\u00a0as he revels in double entendre is, no doubt, the most recognisable ingredient of the genre, but a lesser known trivia about pantomime productions is that they are\u00a0meant to\u00a0be set in a romanticised version of the locality of the audience,\u00a0and be celebrated in song by a chorus of townsfolk.<\/p>\n

These of course, don\u2019t always happen, because what\u2019s incredible about panto is that it moves with the times, implementing what\u2019s popular and reflecting current affairs.\u00a0<\/span>The role\u00a0reversal – a man plays the Dame and a woman plays the principal boy – most likely comes from an unruly Tudor jamboree called the \u2018Feast of Fools\u2019 which would be directed by the \u2018Lord of Misrule\u2019 who was in fact, typically a commoner – a practice thought to have originated from Rome when masters would allow their servants to play overlord for a while. T<\/span>he Victorian era is when the element of magic arrived and very much made itself at home in the genre. Renowned stories, contemporary to the period, such as Cinderella, Aladdin and Robinson Crusoe got given the pantomime treatment: incorporating a metamorphosis sequence where characters spectacularly transform thanks to a magic wand. This would have been a magic bat up until 1870, the year of the\u00a0harlequin’s demise, and today we’re more into trickery – think trapdoors and the illusion of impossibility.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The structural and tonal guidelines to putting on a play of this variety have been collaged\u00a0together over hundreds of years of European, village hall and West End productions. Those are some pretty polarised landscapes to cater to, and as such, the result is, to put it in a word – eccentric, but that also means that pantomimes are everyones’ for the taking. Mirroring\u00a0every generation, pantos\u00a0may not\u00a0tell us who the fairest of them all is, but they do\u00a0show us how to band together, laugh at ourselves and let go.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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If you’d like to get in the limelight and take part in\u00a0one of our Musical Theatre classes, courses or\u00a0companies, see here >><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The British stage has always welcomed pantomime, taking pride and ownership over these cross-dressing, pun-tacular, singalongs that we\u2019ve created into…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4979,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130,147,102],"tags":[328,53,142,288,1300,1299,123,406,407,83,127],"yoast_head":"\n5 Things You Didn't Know About Panto<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"For those who don\u2019t quite feel the appeal of Panto in their cultural DNA, we dig out some fascinating facts from Pantomime's costume box of history\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.city-academy.com\/news\/5-things-didnt-know-about-panto\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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