They emphasized puns and humorous word play, a tradition that continues in pantomime today. Today, pantomimes include songs, gags, slapstick comedy, dancing and special effects. It employs gender-crossing actors and combines topical humour with a story more or less based on a well-known fairy tale, fable or folktale.
Its biggest draw is as a participatory form of theatre, in which the audience is expected to sing along with certain parts of the music and shout out phrases to the performers. Pantomime has a long theatrical history in Western culture dating back to classical theatre. An important part of the pantomime, until the late 19th century, was the harlequinade.
One of the reasons pantomime is so popular is due its universal appeal; traditionally a show for children, adults find themselves returning to the panto for nostalgic escapism, as well as to take their own children, or to enjoy with family members and friends. This is also part of the reason why they have become so popular at Christmas, seen as a Christmas tradition to enjoy each year and reunite with friends and family to celebrate the festival season. As pantomimes are generally enjoyed by children, it was back in the s where it became popular for children to experience a panto at Christmas.
Seen as a treat to particularly enjoy at Christmas, at the time pantomimes involved more acrobatic performances, and dramatic dancing, rather than the more established structure of pantomimes today. Additionally, in the Tudor period, a popular festival called The Feast of Fools, was celebrated. The feast included eating, drinking and role reversal, which is seen as one reason why Pantomimes are now traditionally performed at Christmas.
Another reason is that the founder of the Harlequin character, a prominent figure in the growth of pantomime, was established by John Rich and later David Garrick more here , who only limited his performances to Christmas time. This painting, uncovered in is the only known likeness of John Rich.
It has been fully restored and hangs in a museum in London. Another distinction to this Harlequin was that Garrick only limited his performances to Christmas time and thus began a new legacy. After Rich had died in , Garrick had said this about his legacy:. Tavern Bilkers, by John Weaver, the dancing master at Drury Lane, is cited as the first pantomime produced on the English stage.
Another contemporary pantomime tradition is the celebrity guest star, a practice that dates back to the late 19th century, when Augustus Harris, proprietor of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, hired well-known variety artists for his pantomimes. Theatres use popular artists to promote their pantomime, and the script is often adapted to allow the star to showcase their talents singing, acrobatics etc. Read on to find out…. These street performances appealed to the taste of the general public and were performed by professionals.
There are clear similarities between these performances and our modern day pantos; characters were standardised so that the audience knew what to expect from them; and the principal boy and girl would overcome anything, ensuring that love conquered all.
The slapstick was Arlecchino's favourite weapon, a paddle made from two pieces of wood which made a loud slapping sound when you hit someone with it. French companies performed what they called ballets-pantomimes in London. These dance-mime performances became popular in London and theatres incorporated them into shows as Afterpieces to their main show to help sell tickets.
Interesting Fact In , a book was published that would later have a massive effect on pantomime. He played him for many years and gained the reputation as arguably the best Harlequin ever. The importance of this character is reflected in the name change from Afterpieces to Harlequinades. Intense rivalry sprang up between the theatres producing panto. Interesting Fact John Rich's Harlequin used a Slapstick or wooden bat which he would hit against the scenery to make the scenes change by knocking down a series of hinged flaps.
The chase scene would take the characters to many different locations all controlled by Harlequin's magic bat. The locations of the chase were often places that people would recognise - named streets or areas of London for example. They also included mythical locations. The clown had always been a minor part of the Harlequinade but in , Actor Joseph Grimaldi took the character to new heights.
But the Regency Clown never ends up in gaol. Audiences were thrilled by his mischief and his endless eating precisely because he created on stage the fantasy of a different world: a world without hunger, a world of comic revenge against a highly repressive government.
Grimaldi became one of the great satirists of his age, a Clown who offered ludicrous commentaries on fashion, technology, new forms of transport, and political authority as well. Beneath the manic, shameless energy of this Clown lay sadness, and a life etched by tragedy. Born into an immigrant family, Grimaldi was on stage before he was three, and the family breadwinner seven years later. He was a melancholy man who suffered paralysing periods of hereditary madness.
Perhaps that sadness was what attracted him, both in costume and in temperament, to Pierrot, the broken-hearted French Clown. It was not long before the grimness started to take over. The amazing leaps and pratfalls he performed forced Grimaldi into premature retirement, destitution and an early death. Thousands of people would line the streets as his coffin made its way up to Pentonville Hill.
At the end of the 19th century, Britain is now a major imperial power. Photography has arrived, the telegraph has just been invented, the first motor cars are starting to appear on British streets. How has pantomime changed? The centre of comic gravity is certainly shifting: away from the Clown and toward an unexpected star: a careworn mother, haggard and a bit of a gossip, struggling to cope in this unfriendly world. Pantomime crystallises around the story of a dysfunctional family and that strange, eccentric figure of the Dame.
Dan Leno was the celebrated music-hall performer who created this garrulous, working-class woman. So how did the Pantomime Dame come into being and why do we continue to be fascinated by this bizarre, eccentric figure?
Dames had existed in pantomime before Leno, but they were usually unbelievable, ridiculous characters. Slowly, he began to domesticate the Dame and to imagine her as a mother, facing problems which he and his audiences knew all too well: poverty, unemployment and abandonment. From humble beginnings, Leno himself had risen to fame as a clog dancer and variety artist.
A small thin man, with an odd wistful face, and a husky voice, he was said to have 'the saddest eyes in the world'. What he brought to the Dame was a talent for impersonating the absurd dilemmas of ordinary people, from waiters and railway guards to downtrodden women. What emerged was a lovelorn older woman, facing adversity with a kind of desperate fun.
The audience and the character comically share the knowledge that the Dame is not really a woman; that the Principal Boy is not really a Boy. The strange key to Leno's success - and to the character of the Dame ever since - was his creation of a credible woman whom everyone knows is being played by a man. Performance has always exploited the pleasurable ambiguities of cross-dressing. But what distinguishes gender-bending in pantomime is the mock-seriousness which emerges in Victorian burlesque theatre.
Pantomime's absurdity depends on us enjoying this non-existent pretence. Pantomime self-consciously disorganises the ordinary world and releases us to participate in its magic. Leno created a Dame whose theatrical power comes from the locking together of our sympathy and our laughter.
His women were intensely human characters, living in a chaotic world full of disastrous mishaps. Serve up the cat for lunch. They spoke in a form of inconsequential chatter. This cleverly captured the rhythms of ordinary speech, while opening up chasms of lunacy, one absurdity on top of another. The harlequinade has mysteriously disappeared, a casualty of respectability. For the Victorian middle classes, watching policemen being beaten up is no longer a form of entertainment.
But at the same time, music hall artists such as Leno were infusing pantomime with the plots and dilemmas of working-class culture. With some of these celebrities came a more raucous, bawdy and suggestive edge. Across the UK, children and adults come to their local theatre to be dazzled and thrilled by the spectacle and the fun of pantomime.
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