SHARED OPINION
Why I had to flee London for a night with Widow Twankey
FRANK JOHNSON
James Agate, the biggest noise among interwar British theatre critics, bellowed in 1932, 'Clearing our minds of cant, let it be said that the London pantomime has never been a patch on its provincial brother.' Agate was writing when at Christmas and New Year there would have been a pantomime at Drury Lane, and at half-a-dozen other London theatres.
Today pantomime in London is banished from the West End, and lives on only in the suburbs. But there no theatre is big enough for pantomime as it should be done. For theatres prepared to do the form justice, we have to go to the provinces, or the regions as we are now supposed to call them; to, for example, the Birmingham Hippodrome, the La Scala of .pantomime. There they still spend the money needed. For the opening performance — the matinee on the Saturday before Christmas — the theatre, home of the Birmingham Royal Ballet for the rest of the year, was full. There seemed to be money to be made out of pantomimes. Why, then. do they not survive in the big theatres in the West End, the greediest part of the country?
I do not know. But I would chance a guess. It is also the part of the country that most fears being thought naff. The Christmas pantomime vies with wrestling — now banished from television — as our naffest form of entertainment. But every year a Christmas pantomime tells us much about Britain.
This year's Birmingham Hippodrome show is Aladdin. In under ten minutes comes the first topical reference. Widow Twankey arrives. She is played by Don Maclean. He is of local origin, horn in Sparkbrook. `Don left St Philip's Grammar School, Edgbaston, in 1960 with seven 0-levels and a life-saving certificate.' says the programme. 'His TV career began with Crackerjack and The Black and White Minstrel Show. . . . More recently, he has presented Songs of Praise.' The liberal intelligentsia might forgive him The Black and White Minstrel Show. He was doubtless a man of his time, as much victim as upholder of a racist society. But Songs of Praise is always to be discouraged. I suspect, though, that the nearest thing in the vast Hippodrome audience to a member of the liberal intelligentsia was me. Which shows the extent to which the provincial Christmas pantomime is part of Mr Blair's 'forces of conservatism'.
So in came Mr Maclean's Widow Twankey, and explained that she is so hardup that she may have to sell her house. 'Don't worry,' she adds, `Cherie Blair will have to buy it for her son.' The adults start laughing. The children are silent. They cannot quite place this Cherie Blair. The name 'Cherie' suggests a Crackerjack presenter, or a lovely, biliously coloured ice cream. So, just to be on the safe side, the children laugh too. The important thing is that the show is not now going in the government's favour. But Labour holds all the seats for miles around the Hippodrome with impregnable majorities. The party can easily survive such satire. Doubtless it will keep an eye on next year's show.
Aladdin arrives. Until about a decade or so ago, he would have been the Principal Boy. To enlighten, or indeed baffle, nonBritish readers, it should be explained that this means that, being the handsome hero, he would have been played by a beautiful young actress with legs of sufficient calibre to look magnificent in thigh-high leather boots. To explain why this is a British tradition would need more space, and possibly a psychoanalyst.
Principal Boys are still to be found in pantomimes, but there is an increasing movement towards the male lead being played by a male. This one was Mr Bobby Davro. His Saturday night series, Bobby Davro on the Box, 'immediately topped the ratings for six consecutive years. . . . Versatility is the key to Bobby's longevity as a high-profile personality. . . . Bobby lives in Surrey with his wife Trudi and daughters Brittany, Tierney and Marnie. In his rare moments away from the live stage or TV studios, Bobby likes nothing better than a game of snooker, a spot of fishing or a glass of Chardonnay in front of the telly.' For the audience, then, he is an aspirational figure. This explains his extraordinary hold on their attention through more than two hours of laser beams, explosions, police chases and singsongs.
Aladdin explains to someone or other that he is in love with the emperor's daughter, the princess. He wants to marry her. 'What else does he want?' someone asks. That someone whispers to someone else. `Don't be ridiculous.' the latter replies. `He'd look ridiculous in her knickers.' All across the great auditorium, the adults give out foghorns of laughter; mainly the women. The men chuckle. Children ask them what they are laughing at, and are not told. Pantomime, like so much art, runs at several levels of understanding.
It is all so fast and exciting that I may misattribute. But I think I am right in saying that it is Aladdin who utters the next reference to a Briton recently in the news. If he marries the princess, he says, he will be Prince of Wales. But the present holder of that title will never be king, he predicts. I leaned forward in anticipation. `He won't be king with those ears,' he adds. `They'd never get his head on the postage stamp.' So the reason is aesthetic, or philatelic, rather than republican. The present Prince of Wales should be relieved, unless he is vain about his head.
The princess is played by Miss Melinda Messenger. She is a distinguished pagethree girl (retd). She 'first hit the headlines in January 1997, when posters of a doubleglazing campaign she was fronting, "Class Behind Glass", started disappearing from their sites and ending up in young boys' bedrooms'. The programme's next phrase proves that the old diplomacy is not dead: `The Sun brought her to the attention of the nation.'
She is attacked by some monsters, possibly feminists from the London media. But Spiderman swings down on almost undetectable wires from high under the roof deep into the auditorium, and drives them off. That is, just before the Thunderbirds rocket arrives. The pantomime, like the novel after Joyce, scorns mere logical narrative.
After that came another topical reference. Widow Twankey: 'I bought some talcum powder from Geoffrey Robinson [a Midlands MP]. It got right up my nose.' And Mr Duncan Smith? Unmentioned. Which is not necessarily to reassure him.
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