Arise, McKnight of the Pantomime

Just as soon as I decided to make a grand pronouncement - about pantomimes - somebody had to prove me wrong. I probably ought to have paid more attention when Robert Dawson Scott mentioned it a few years ago, but Johnny McKnight has found a way around the problem of pantomime being stuck in a tedious repetition.

Aganeza Scrooge is a welcome surprise: not only does McKnight mash up a traditional festive story and the whole pantomime ritual, he does it with a surprising panache. When I spoke to him for The Skinny, he admitted that pantomime had not really been his childhood introduction to theatre and that he had approached it from the perspective of a performance artists (he's a graduate of the Contemporary Performance Practice course at the RCS, although they called both things something different when he was there). Most encouragingly, he dumps the final sing-along, runs with the idea of a sympathetic villain who experiences a moral conversion and uses the self-consciousness of pantomime to poke fun at its more predictable excesses.

Although this is far from my fantasy of a politically engaged, populist show that rescues theatre from television's hegemony, Aganeza Scrooge doesn't feel like a ready-made, identikit show - something even the much-loved Forbes Masson pantomimes were slipping towards. McKnight keeps the sly slaps at other productions, even mocking the reliance on cheeky toilet humour, and the ritualistic energy: his love of popular culture, however, is a sharp contrast to its increasingly cynical inclusion in most other pantomimes. It is driven along by McKnight's personality, even if he is in drag and playing a Victorian miser. It connects back to his earlier Big Gay Trilogy by hooking his character to deeper, more universal themes.

There are still plenty of fart gags, and McKnight torments his audience as well as any other dame: but his comedy is more serious, more alert and there's even one-liners that aren't signposted twenty minutes in advance. It's not quite a revolution yet, but it is a sign that pantomime could be original as well as popular.

At the Tron until 5 January