I have found a copy of the program note I wrote for the pantomime performed at the Folger Theatre here in Washington in 1984. Attitudes to some aspects of this “art form” have obviously changed drastically in the last 40 years.

A Native’s Look at British Panto

In the spring of 1953 my parents bought a television set. Neighbors in England’s Midlands who had never seen such a bizarre machine would come and stare at the test patterns because programming didn’t start until the coronation of Queen Elizabeth11 later that year. The date is significant because life in the British provinces was about to change. Britons began to spend more time at home, sitting in their most “comfy” chair, watching “telly.”
Prior to 1953 many if not most of that audience would attend their local repertory theatre, and not just a few times a year, as audiences here do, but every time a new show was mounted (weekly in some theatres, fortnightly in others).

Around Christmas, almost everyone attended the long-anticipated annual event known as pantomime.
I happened to attend even more frequently than that having been born into a family most of whose members worked in the theatre. My father’s office was just off the Dress Circle in the Grand Theatre, Wolverhampton, and from there, when not organizing his cricket team made up of actors, he produced and sometimes wrote pantomimes as well as plays.

As in much of British life, nothing really changes yet nothing remains the same; and so it is with pantomime. Meant to be predictable, pantomime’s traditions are expected and demanded by audiences. It is not too surprising when one considers that pantomime of some sort or another has been performed since the time of the Romans, whose Saturnalian feasts included such entertaining “reverses” as men dressed as women and royalty depicted as paupers.
A comedia del’arte love story — boy wants to marry girl but is thwarted by girl’s father — was added some time in the 16th- century and by the 1700's two London theatres, the Drury Lane and Lincolns’ Inn Fields, were trying to outdo each other by producing bigger and bigger pantos. Thereafter, storylines became increasingly complex and more characters joined the parade, most notably the Clown, a contribution credited to Joseph Grimaldi, considered by many theatre historians the greatest clown of all time.

By the late 1800’s pantomime was more than just a story with funny business. It also had jugglers, acrobats, animals (real and fake), jokes, and schtick; artistes would do their speciality numbers just as today when pop singers appear in pantomime their biggest hit is somehow incorporated into the show.
And so is audience participation. There is always a sequence where the audience has to find someone or something. (In Wolverhampton where the local accent makes cockney seem intelligible to an American ear, audiences would scream, “It’s beeeeeeyindcha.” Translation: It’s behind you. Hissing the villain is encouraged as is singing along. And “if you don’t know the words," one of the cast will warn you just at the moment a cheat sheet is dropped from the crosswalk above the stage, “you’ll learn them!”

The repertoire of pantomimes is very limited — there are probably only a dozen or so. The most frequently produced are Cinderella, Robinson Crusoe, Babes in the Wood, Robin Hood, Aladdin, and Dick Whittington who always has a cat named Tiddles. Characters, many of whom have absurd names (e.g. Widow Twankey in Mother Goose) are also familiar as is the way they are cast. For example, there is nothing kinky about the Principal Boy, that part is always played by a woman, preferably one with good legs,* just as the Dame is always a man. In the Folger’s current production, the Ugly Sisters take the place of a Dame.
The pantomime version of Cinderella, first performed at London’s Drury Lane in 1804, comes now to the Folger and for those of you to whom this is a novelty (and for those who need a little reminder) perspective is offered in the following observations made by two critics, the first writing in the 1850s; the second, in the 1930s:

“He who does not like pantomime either says what he does not think or is not so wise as he fancies himself. Not to like pantomime is not to like love, not to take a holiday, not to remember that we have been children ourselves.”

Pantomime is a release of pure animal spirits, it expresses the spirit of carnival, it holds the magic of turning us, however old we are, once more to children.
By Susan Davidson

*In 1661, Samuel Pepys made the following notation in his diary: “‘To the Theatre’ … where a woman acted Parthenia, and came afterwards on the stage in men’s clothing, and had the best legs that ever I saw, and I was very well pleased with it."