Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 14 January 2016

What is it that draws a genuine Hollywood legend to Milton Keynes Theatre?

Before the start of Aladdin in Milton Keynes this week a promotional video showed Brian Blessed in oriental costume bellowing to the audience that pantomime had never been so popular in its long history and that Britain was still full of people longing to shout ‘He’s behind you!’, ‘Oh, yes it is!’, ‘Oh, no it isn’t!’, or whatever. It was a Sunday afternoon matinée and the theatre was full. The same had been true the week before at Cinderella in Northampton. The evidence seemed to suggest that Brian Blessed was right. But I did find myself wondering why.

The pantomime may still be able to fill provincial theatres, but as entertainment it has deteriorated steadily over the years. Many of its traditional features still survive — the cross-dressing, the risqué sexual innuendoes, the audience participation. But others have not. While the ‘pantomime dame’, always played by a man, remains a guaranteed feature (Widow Twankey in Aladdin, the Ugly Sisters in Cinderella), the ‘principal boy’, played by a girl in breeches, has vanished. The male hero is now a conventional, good-looking man. (Modern audiences, it seems, are happy about men playing women, but are embarrassed by women playing men, especially when they are courting another woman.)

There are other interesting survivals, such as the tradition that the ‘good fairy’ always enters from stage right and the ‘villain’ from stage left, a convention going back to medieval mystery plays in which the right side of the stage symbolised Heaven and the left side Hell. But what has happened to the ‘transformation scene’, once the most magical feature of the pantomime, in which the characters and scenery would change before one’s eyes in an elaborate piece of theatrical wizardry? That has gone, as has any episode of calm, mystery or romance.

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