Write a Brilliant Pantomime with Billy & Wolfy

In more prosaic terms, English pantomime is a Christmas entertainment based on a fairy tale. It is supposedly for children and is usually an English child’s first experience of live theatre. English pantomime is:

A Fairy Story PLUS

1. Plus the Dame character. This character acts as a kind of earthy chorus much like the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, except of course that everything is much broader and we know that there will be a happy ending. The dame is absurdly overdressed and, to add a further sexual frisson, is traditionally played by a man in drag.

2. Plus a broad style that emphasises audience participation. There is much warning of the hero by shouting "He’s behind you" and so on

3. Plus music and spectacle. The whole thing is supported by song and dressed to look spectacular.

There are other traditions too but none that are central to making it work.

The most noticeable of these other traditions is that the hero is often played by a woman in tights. I still cannot find a good dramatic justification for this. Maybe young kids are less frightened by a woman. Certainly men like seeing women’s legs and this must be a good commercial justification. Maybe there is also an echo of lesbian dalliance - such a staple of porn movies. I don’t know. 

Another tradition is that the witches and the fairies traditionally talk in verse (usually rhyming pentameters). This can work well as a differentiating device. Shakespeare always used it to divorce the high characters from the low – also it is fun to write and, if reasonably written, fun to act.

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