Oh yes we do! Why Scotland loves panto
Contains Alan Cumming, the 7:84 Theatre Company and a classic Johnnie Beattie gag
Ten minutes to curtain up and the King’s Theatre is gripped by the demented excitement of 1,500 Glaswegian children jacked up on refined sugar and dreams of Christmas.
To give you a sense of the anticipation in the air I filmed a short video. Sound on for the full effect.
A selection of Crimbo songs is setting the mood, and a tinkle of notes on a xylophone signal a singalong opportunity this audience is not going to miss. No siree. Seven-year-olds all around the auditorium leap to their feet and start dancing. It is Maria Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You, and the primary school packing out the Upper Circle must have been learning it at school assembly because they know all the words, even the “Baby!” bit.
It is a wet Thursday afternoon in December and the 1pm matinee show of the big Glasgow pantomime is packed out, as it will be twice a day, six days a week for a month, with the last show on January 7. Tickets in the 1,785-seat auditorium range from £13 to £84. Everyone involved in this production will make a lot of money.
In addition to the school groups there are lots of 50-something grandparents with their grandkids. But there are also numerous hen parties of middle-aged women decked in tinsel and clutching large glasses of white wine, intent on a good time.
The lights go down. The hairs on the back of my neck go up. The live orchestra in the pit attacks the overture. The excitement is palpable. Two dashing young men in gold boots and red velvet leggings march on stage waving embroidered flags. This is not even close to being the most gay moment in this afternoon’s entertainment. The whole thing is camp as Black’s of Greenock. (One for the oldies, there.)
A trumpet fanfare and a whoosh of fireworks and we’re off. I am not ashamed to admit the next couple of hours are best time I’ve had in a theatre for many years.
The principals at the King’s panto are hardy perennials. A boyish Johnnie Mac bounds onto the stage. “Hiya pals! My name’s Muddles!” Then, sotto voce: “…this year.” Elaine C Smith, as Snow White’s nurse, Nurse Bella, is in her element. This is a proper A-list Glasgow legend, and these are her people. “I’m a Bafta-nominated actress!” she complains at one moment of madcap nonsense, and everybody laughs.
This is very much Glasgow’s panto. Nurse Bella tells us she bought a Govan advent calendar: half the windows were broken and somebody had pinched all the chocolate. Govan gets it in the neck repeatedly, for some reason. As do Glasgow’s posher neighbourhoods, quite rightly. At one stage Smith appears in a pink babygro as Govan Barbie, accompanied by an effete Kelvinside Ken.
This winter’s production is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. And yes, I was thinking the same thing. Surely not actual dwarfs? Not in these days of hair-trigger sensitivities?
But no, skipping onto the stage come seven actors of limited size, or restricted growth, or persons of short stature, or whatever the preferred term of the moment might be. When they make their entrance there is an audible gasp from the adults in the audience, who were clearly thinking what I was thinking.
Some of the dwarfs are panto veterans and have admirable comic timing. Some of the others, less so. A couple are seemingly there to make up the numbers. One of them - Sleepy, I must assume - spends most of his time on stage, well, sleeping.
Despite the dwarfs there are some nods to modernity and diversity. Snow White is played by a Scots Asian actress called Blythe Jandoo, and why not? She is woken from her eternal slumber not by the well-spoken prince but with a kiss from Nurse Bella, the woman who raised her. The dwarfs are not miners: they work in renewable energy on a solar power farm.
There is a nod or two to the realities of the city outside: a dark joke about the struggle to get a GP appointment; a rueful reference to the cost of living crisis.
My visit is early in the run and the cast are still getting into gear. At one point the wicked witch is captured and Smith asks the audience what they should do with her. The script, I imagine, has a stage direction along the lines of: “Audience shouts ‘Banish her.’”
In fact a thousand children scream: “KILL HER!”
Smith cannot hide her amusement. “I think we have the measure of our Glasgow audience,” she says.
All the elements of a traditional Scottish panto are embraced like old friends. Slapstick. Misunderstandings. Leggy dancers. Orchestrated confusion. Booing the baddies. Attempts to sing love songs, subverted by chaos. Puppetry. A hydraulic boom that has Johnnie Mac in a jetpack flying over the audience. A singalong with words on a big screen, to the tune of Ye Cannae Shove Yer Granny Aff a Bus, rhyming curry with McFlurry.
And all of it predicated on a warm, knowing, two-way conversation between players and audience. Fourth wall? What fourth wall? Eat your heart out, Terence Rattigan.
In February 2006 I interviewed the Scottish actor Alan Cumming in New York:
[Alan Cumming] is taking a late breakfast in New York’s Paramount hotel, a lip-glossed showbiz haunt on West 46th Street, just the length of a red carpet away from Times Square. The hotel has a glamorous sweeping staircase that would bring out the inner showgirl in the Rev Ian Paisley.
Cumming is so famous in this town the table is booked under a pseudonym — today he is “Bertram Moody”. He knows a pleasing day lies ahead. Later he will view the final cut of Suffering Man’s Charity, an art-house horror movie he has directed, and in which he takes the lead role. Then he is due at rehearsals for the most eagerly awaited Broadway show of the year, The Threepenny Opera, which opens next month with Cumming as the main box-office draw.
The new Broadway show takes a typically Brechtian approach, with Cumming talking directly to the audience. It echoes the role that made him a star in America and the toast of New York in 1998: his Tony-award winning performance as the MC in Cabaret. Expectations are high, but so are nerves, especially as Brecht is a very brave proposition for middle-of-the-road Broadway.
Cumming’s Scottishness, he believes, is crucial to the way he approaches this kind of role. “The fourth wall [the space separating an audience from the action of a theatrical performance, traditionally conceived of as an imaginary wall] has sort of passed us by in Scotland, and I think that’s really good. You can really connect emotionally with an audience. I tell people here about Johnnie Beattie.” He breaks into a 1950s Scottish accent and sings: “Welcome to the ceilidh, come in, come in, come in!”
Some unpacking is perhaps necessary here. Born in 1926, Johnnie Beattie was a Scottish stand-up comedian and singer whose popularity peaked with a Saturday night TV variety show in the 60s but whose influence - and that of the music hall culture he personified - could still be felt decades later. Supremely confident to to point of being suave, he was still selling out Scottish theatres for variety shows a few years into the 21st century.
A typical Johnnie Beattie joke goes like this:
“Did you see the surgeon?”
“Surgeon? I never saw the first two.”
You have to say it in a Glasgow accent. Never mind.
The TV shows presented by Beattie in the 1970s were curious cultural artefacts even then. Offered up as ceilidhs they were nothing like the actual ceilidhs you might encounter in a village hall or a private home: informal gatherings of friends and neighbours where old songs were sung, old stories were retold, a fiddle or a moothie was produced, and tipsy relatives attempted an untidy Gay Gordons.
The BBC Scotland light entertainment version was ordered, couthy, sedate and altogether more respectable. Beattie wore a bow tie and silver-buttoned Bonnie Prince Charlie jacket with his kilt. The dancers adhered to the strict nostrums of the The Royal Scottish Country Dance Society. The informality of the ceilidh and the knockabout of working-class music hall were pasturised and repackaged. This was Scottish culture seen through a Reithian filter.
And yet, in absence of alternatives, these shows carried immense cultural power. They came to define mainstream Scottish culture. They also provided an orthodoxy to kick against. The source material for these shows - the Lowland Scotland folk song tradition, Gaelic culture in all its richness, Scottish music hall, the actual ceilidh - were ripe for rediscovery.
And also for reinvention. Step forward the left-wing agitprop popularised by the 7:84 Scotland Theatre Company in the 1970s and early 1980s.
The name was drawn from an economic statistic that seven per cent of the population owned 84 per cent of the wealth, a ratio that these days looks positively socialist.
I used to know a bit about 7:84 because its founder John McGrath was the subject of my honours dissertation as a student of English literature at Aberdeen University in the early 1980s. Much of his analysis still holds true today.
McGrath spelt out his credo in a 1981 book called A Good Night Out, in which he rejected the conventional values of mainstream British theatre aimed at a well-fed, well-read, middle-class audience that regarded itself as sensitive and sophisticated.
In particular he was scathing about the emphasis on mystery, in which a play was a puzzle to be solved. Audiences who preferred something more direct, said McGrath, were too often dismissed as philistine and in need of education.
In fact, he wrote, working class entertainment had a tradition equally rich, equally legitimate, and equally capable of conveying the deepest human truths.
McGrath said he rejected five common assumptions about art in general and theatre in particular:
1. that art is universal, capable of meaning the same to all people;
2. that the more 'universal' it is, the better it is;
3. that the 'audience' for theatre is an idealised white, middle-class, etc., person and that all theatre should be dominated by the tastes and values of such a person;
4. that, therefore, an audience without such an idealized person's values is an inferior audience; and
5. that the so-called 'traditional values' of English literature are now anything other than an indirect expression of the dominance over the whole of Britain of the ruling class of the south-east of England.
McGrath’s 7:84 company instead turned to the worlds of 19th century music hall, early 20th century variety shows and the culture of contemporary working men’s clubs. He was seeking an authentic working-class medium. And he struck gold with the ceilidh, that distinctive Highland form of entertainment aped in ersatz form by Beattie in his TV shows.
7:84’s most famous production, The Cheviot, The Stag and The Black, Black Oil, drew parallels between the Highland Clearances and the oil boom of the 1970s. Playing in village halls and community centres across Scotland, it took the form of songs, stories, comedy and political speechifying with the aim of providing a good night out. It birthed an approach that remains today the definitive form of modern Scottish theatre. You can hear stylistic echoes of those 1970s shoestring 7:84 productions - and those of a similar company called Wildcat, run by McGrath’s brother-in-law, David MacLennan - in the work of the National Theatre of Scotland. Founded in 2006, the NTS has taken shows such as Gregory Burke’s Black Watch to Broadway, with rave reviews.
The removal of the fourth wall and the undermining of conventional middle-class forms of drama remains controversial even today. Take the TV series Mrs Brown’s Boys, a vehicle for the Irish comedian Brendan O’Carroll who plays the eponymous mother in drag. Perhaps no other TV sitcom provokes as much ire and bile. Before the show was a hit on TV, a stage version played at the Pavilion in Glasgow for seven years in a row, with sell-out runs of up to three weeks at a time. When it hit the small screen it became one of the most popular sitcoms of the 21st century. In 2013 its Christmas special was watched by more than 11 million people in the UK. And yet it is hated by almost every critic, even in newspapers aimed at working-class readers. One review in the Daily Record condemned it as “lazy, end-of-pier trash”, adding: “One half-hour of this actually made me angry. Angry that the BBC seem to be abandoning quality in the pursuit of lowest common denominator ratings.”
Critics are apparently unable to recognise that the show’s tropes - cross-dressing, the frequent mugging and fluffing of lines, the merry crash of scenery, the knowing familiarity between live audience and performers, the ribaldry, the scatology, the reliance on types and stereotypes, the constant breaking of the fourth wall - are popular theatre traditions hundreds of years old. Mrs Brown’s Boys would be instantly recognisable to Shakespeare. It would probably be recognisable to Aristophanes, who wrote comedies in Ancient Greece more than two thousand years ago.
So too would Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the King’s. The Scottish panto is a glorious combination of Shakespearean comedy, old-time music hall, seaside variety show, 16th century Commedia dell'Arte, Johnnie Beattie light entertainment and 7:84 directness. It is slick and commercial and successful. It knows its audience and its audience knows exactly what to expect. It is, by John McGrath’s exacting definition, a good night out.
The King’s Theatre opened in 1904. Down the years its stage has been graced by Michael Caine, Katherine Hepburn, Laurence Olivier, Noel Coward, Vivien Leigh, Dolly Parton, Alec Guinness and The Jackson Five. And yet in Glasgow it is the panto for which it is best known. The theatre management knows this. On a stairway is a huge painting of Smith dressed as a panto dame. On a plinth is a bronze sculpture of the boots worn by Gerard Kelly, one of the best-loved actors in the role now taken by Johnnie Mac, who died aged 51 in 2010.
The 2024 panto at the The King’s Glasgow, again with Elaine C Smith and Johnnie Mac, will be Peter Pan. It opens on November 30. The date is already in my diary. Am I now, after a break of more than 50 years, a panto fan again?
Oh yes I am!
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I was racking my brains: did I ever actually see The Cheviot etc? I know it was on the circuit when I was able to see it. Or did I ever even read it? Anyhoo, for the most of the years when I lived abroad, when we came back to the UK for Christmas, I insisted that we took our girls to the panto, wherever it was, an essential British cultural injection they were never going to see in Belgium. I taught pantomime as a theatrical form for a couple of years when I was an Asst Prof at Ghent, in charge of The History and Culture of the Anglo-Saxon Countries (first year compulsory module). It was received with bemusement and probable disbelief.
An excellent piece seamlessly weaving Scottish National Treasures- Elaine C Smith, Alan Cummings, Johnny ( Mr Topicality) Beattie, 7:84 & Gerard Kelly
I might even go back to a panto!!