“BOO!”
The children
in the audience yell as Cinderella’s stepmother throws up her head and laughs
wickedly.
Exit
Stepmother.
Enter a good
character.
He goes about his own business for a while, and then turns to the
audience to ask a question.
“Will you help me?”
The children
in the audience answer “Oh yes, we will.”
The
character pretends he did not hear.
“I said,
WILL YOU HELP ME?” he hollers.
“OH YES, WE
WILL.” The children’s voices boom in the cinema hall.
A pantomime
is about audience participation as much as the story and the characters.
The children
in the audience are encouraged to shout “It’s behind you!” or “Oh no, it isn’t!”
They are sometimes invited to participate in a well-known
song. They are grouped into two halves and each half is encouraged to sing
louder than the other half. At times, children in the audience are invited on
stage to sing along with the characters.
The
Christmas Pantomime evolved as a theatrical genre in England and it is traditionally
based on Children’s fairy tales such as Cinderella or Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs. There are some conventions that are followed when presenting a panto.
There are gender
crossing actors, song and dance, and double entendres that are targeted at the
adults and cleverly presented as utterly genteel dialogues which bounce off the
limited comprehension of children.
There is
humour but not much pathos although there could be a dark scene.
Conventionally, in the medieval mystery plays, the right
side of the stage symbolised Heaven and the left side symbolised Hell, so in a
pantomime, the goodies enter the stage from the right (which is on the left of
the audience) and the baddies enter from the left (which is on the right of the
audience).
These traditions are centuries old. It was recently
revealed that even the Queen had portrayed Prince Charming in a 1941
performance of Cinderella at Windsor Castle.
Pantomimes provide comic relief and childish joy.
So if you are watching a panto this season in England or beyond, become a
child again, forget the adult world, cup your hands to your mouth and yell with
the children, “Oh yes, it is!”
(The theatre
group, RAHADS, regularly puts up pantomimes in Muscat. Please see the poster
below for this season’s production.)
