The Pantosphere

This man is the King of the Palace, Kilmarnock

It's December and the theatres are committed to a popular art form. Aside from the odd resistance from the cabaret community - there's Torture Garden and Missy Malone's burlesque evening and the more experimental artists of Anatomy - it's either pantomimes or, for the more sophisticated families, the Christmas themed entertainment.

The bursts of cabaret make sense: sharing the heritage of vaudeville with pantomime, they can take advantage of a lively audience in need of warmth and fun in the darkness months. On the west coast of Scotland, however, the dominance of pantomime has led to each of the different venues finding their own, distinctive version. The King's Theatre has the slick, professional show - now challenged by the SECC - the Tron gives it a Glaswegian twist, now teaming up with Johnny McKnight after years of Forbes Masson scripts - and the Pavilion is the anarchic, slightly risque remix: Jim Davidson might not be in it this year, but his appearance for two years does explain the tone and target audience.

The changing face of pantomime

Despite these regional variations, pantomime is innately conservative: there are a variety of set-pieces (in Kilmarnock, Liam Dolan has been rewriting similar scenes into different plots for eight years), the jokes are supposed to be bad and the audience interaction is ritualistic. A bad pantomime is marked by the failure of the cast to get these routines swinging. The usual parameters of good theatre - remembering lines, strong characterisation, consistent pace and structure - are replaced by the need to make sure that the audience are disruptive in the right way.

In a recent interview with The Skinny, McKnight pointed out that many of the tropes of pantomime are shared with the sort of performance emerging from the Live Art scene. Brecht's rejection of "the fourth wall" is mirrored by pantomime's emphasis on direct engagement with the audience. In much the same way as Beggar's Opera reminds the audience that it is a fiction, the constant slipping in and out of character, the bit where some cute kids are dragged on-stage and the dispensation of sweeties from the stage make pantomime more like a game, or the Mass.

Perhaps the most disappointing consequence of this conservatism is that the potential of pantomime as a purposeful theatre has been neglected. Its carnivalesque spirit allows it to poke fun at authority: the Pavilion pantomime has the occasional shot at the council and gets very close to sectarian humour (although to laugh at the rivalries rather than to harvest the rich fields of nasty bigotry), and the Tron, in the Masson years, had a habit of mocking the other, rival shows. Yet even in the most parochial pantomimes, there's no attempt to give the details a satirical bite.

The conservatism of the form, then, is mirrored by a social conservatism. If political theatre is coming into its own again, the pantomime isn't joining in. It's a good example, perhaps, of how popularity can limit ambition: having discovered a good product, theatres seem unwilling to risk extending the form or content.

This isn't absolute - McKnight's increasing presence on the festive scene brings the sensibilities of his Random Accomplice work, and the Lyceum, The Citizens, The Traverse, and the National Theatre of Scotland (with their Christmas Carol) all present plays that are more closely connected to their usual output. However, these might be examples of how a niche can be found in the Christmas market.

He's enjoying imself

Given its long history - it goes back to classical times, through medieval mummers' plays and to the music hall - its surprising how little influence pantomime has beyond its own month. There are few examples of pantomime influencing theatre, even though its techniques aren't especially divorced from contemporary practice and it achieves audiences that most most companies envy.

A few exceptions aside - Ali Maloney did a grotesque pantomime last year at Arches Live, and I, Tommy slid from political satire into broad comedic antics pretty quickly - pantomime feeds the theatre neither with audiences nor ideas. It seems to exist in a splendid isolation, preserving the traces of music hall (Johnny Mac at the Pavilion has the genuine aura of a 1930s comedian, catch-phrase like a twitch at the end of every sentence), 1970s humour and the belief in entertainment that can be for all the family (with the odd "one for the dads").

Perhaps most importantly, pantomime is the one place where the Hegelian model of synthesis is played out in its most immediate format.

Oh, no, it isn't.

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Oh no, it isn't.