Big frocks, silk stockings and lissom ladies

Matthew Dennison on the life of Augustus Harris, the Victorian showman who invented the Christmas pantomime and pioneered sex, celebrity and excess as an art form

Forget Lord Leighton and his fleshy goddesses forced to bare all in the interests of classical scholarship. Forget Wilkie Collins and Mary E. Braddon, and those sensational stories of exciting young women with a past. Foremost among 19th-century efforts to cloak titillation in the garb of respectability is the invention of the principal boy of pantomime.

You know the scenario. The stage is set. Young boy is looking for love. Bad guys — an overdressed middle-aged transvestite plus accomplices, most of whom appear and disappear in puffs of smoke to the accompaniment of hissing and booing on the part of the audience — do their best to stop him. Despite this, young boy finds love and all ends happily ever after. A nice Christmas story for the children and eight weeks of light work for the old lushes in the green room. Turn the young boy into a lissom young woman in skimpy disguise, and faster than you can say ‘silk stockings’ every father in the front row is a happy man.

Pantomime is an esoteric art form. Girls become boys and the barmaid type in the big frock has a hairy chest and five o’clock shadow. It’s a region of subversion and carefully orchestrated misrule. It ends with love triumphant and — much like life — reaches this happy climax after a hefty dose of raucous singing, ungainly dancing and endless jokes about politicians, mothers-in-law and last night’s television. Despite tracing its origins to medieval mystery plays and the traditions of the commedia dell’arte, it is a quintessentially British entertainment. It did not evolve overnight.