Elfie's Magical Dramaturgy: Liam Dolan @ The Pavilion

Christmas is on the way quicker than you know and I can’t wait! This year is my first Pavilion Pantomime & I am SO excited to be in it.

I’m playing Elfie & we've got a magical adventure that you’re going to absolutely love!! The cast are fantastic, made up of old pals and new ones & I’m really looking forward to spending Christmas with them in Glasgow.


I know that you've had a successful number of years out at Kilmarnock - what attracted you to the Pavilion this year?

I’ve been in Kilmarnock for 12 years. This year I was offered the chance to appear in the Pavilion in a brand new production of  Elfie’s Magical Adventures - I have always been a fan of the Pavilion Theatre & Doing Panto there was one of my lifetime ambitions so I jumped at the chance.

How are you feeling about being an Elf this year?

I love it, It’s so much fun creating a magical Christmas character

You clearly love panto time- what is it that draws you back to it every year?

It’s the best time of year for me as a Performer, It’s a family tradition that everyone loves & for some kids Panto is their first ever Theatre Experience and it’s fantastic to be part of that.


How well does it fit with your other work - which is very diverse, but does have a strand of work for younger audiences?

It fits in very well, I sometimes have to re-schedule things as the

Panto is a priority and it takes up a lot of time with two shows a day, six days a week

Is there anything about the Pavilion pantomime that has surprised you?

No, I have seen the Pavilion Pantomime every year so I knew what to expect, I have also worked at the Pavilion on other projects so I knew how beautiful the building was and how fantastic the audiences were.

Is Craig Glover as much fun off stage as on?

Craig and I are great friends outside of work - we have an absolute ball on and off stage so the chemistry you see onstage is genuine.

Why do you think panto keeps its place in the programme? I mean, it must be the oldest popular form still drawing in audiences…

Pantomime is a British Institution, It is part of peoples festive activities and going to the panto has been passed down from generation to generation.

Beanstalk Dramaturgy: Sleeping Trees @ Theatre 503

What was the inspiration for this performance?
We were keen to make a version of a pantomime that had a much wider appeal then the ones you see popping up round the country each year. We not only wanted to appeal to a mainstream pantomime audience but a fringe comedy audience too, whilst pleasing children and adults simultaneously. 
 
With this in mind we were inspired by a number of things, comedy shows we had seen at the Fringe, children's shows as well as the British tradition of taking the family to a pantomime. It was a big challenge but a thoroughly enjoyable process and we are hugely pleased with the product left at the end of it.  

How did you go about gathering the team for it?
We were initially approached by director Tom Attenborough in 2013 where the idea for the project first came to light. Through his connections as well as our own we were able to assemble a brilliant little team of creative people all of which we are very proud to have working with us. 

We acquired Mark Newnham who writes and performs all the music for the show very last minute and we couldn't be happier or more privileged to have him on board. We don't sing or dance normally in our other work so we must commend Mark's patience with us as well as Polly Bennet and Nancy Kettle our wonderful choreographers.

What made you decide on this particular venue?
We have always been a fan of the work produced at Theatre 503. Over the years they have continued to have an increasing involvement with new writing and experimental theatre. We always knew it was going to be a challenge for us making a pantomime, let alone our very first show suitable for all ages, so we thought there wouldn't be a better platform than 503 to do so.

The Latchmere pub underneath also does an outstanding roast dinner. This had absolutely nothing to do with the decision... 


Was your process typical of the way that you make a performance?
Certainly not. The process was a completely fresh experience for everybody on board. Up until the pantomime (a genre of performance we had never created before) we had not worked with set, costume or props. 


To create Cinderella and the Beanstalk we worked with a director, musician, movement director, stage-fight choreographer band and even a magician to create visual illusions. It was certainly a lot to process at first but so beneficial to make this one of the most exciting shows we have ever created.

The challenge was marrying all these incredibly talented people with our stripped back approach to comedy-theatre and couldn't be more proud to have achieved that.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?
The most important thing we wanted to achieve with this show is to get children and adults laughing at the same thing. We were very keen to not to have one joke for the kids then another for the adults. 

We want families to share the experience rather than wait for their turn. We also wanted to stay clear of all of the traditional smut in pantomime. It's not our style and we don't want to alienate kids by having jokes that go over their heads.


Do you see your work within any particular tradition?
We do. There are plenty of pantomime traditions in our show, some of them are modernised a bit, but there is a lot for pantomime aficionados to recognise. 

At the same time there is a lot of new things being added to the genre, we are originally a fringe theatre style company, so we bring a lot of that into anything we do, we feel this adds something new and fresh which hopefully people haven't seen before, while still being satisfied if they are fans of pantomime traditions.
 
 

Ali Bawbag and the Four Dramaturgies: Gary McNair talks panto

Christmas Panto
Ali Bawbag and the Four Tealeafs
Mon, 30 November, 2015 — Wed, 23 December, 2015
By Dave Anderson and Gary McNair

Featuring Dave Anderson, George Drennan, Frances Thorburn and Anita Vettesse

Ali is a very poor man, with a brother who is wealthy. He also has a wife who looks, let’s face it, like a man. One day, Ali is in the woods – don’t ask – when he sees a (budget) band of robbers. 

The leader says a magic password and a boulder rolls away from a rock face. Ali discovers, after they’ve gone, a cave full of riches, and his life is never the same again. A strange tale unfolds, involving Ali’s greedy brother, his aspirational wife, the band of robbers, and more besides.

Drennan and trumpet

Òran Mór’s annual Christmas Panto for grown-up children has become a not to miss Festive Season comedy treat. Join us this December for Dave Anderson and Gary McNair’s irreverent take on Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Boo, cheer and sing-along, Oh, yes you will!


How did you get involved in this PPP panto business?
Gary McNair: I’ve got a good relationship with the guys at PPP. I had my very first commission their with Crunch and I’ve gone on to write and direct several other pieces for them. I’m also a part of the group the DM collective, founded by David MacLennan,  we create political satire shows there every year or so. 

It was through this that I first got to work with the wonderful Dave Anderson, we’ve really got a lot out of working together on those shows and from there, he invited me in to collaborate with him on the writing process for the summer Panto which was a real honour and a great laugh so, thankfully, he’s asked me back along.  


Will you be performing in it? After all you’re known as a monologist who performs his own scripts.
Oh no I won’t! 

I know that I’m perhaps more known to people as someone who performs my own scripts, but I tend to only do that once a year and so I save performing for the projects that I feel are right for me to do or the stories that I feel that only I could tell. But for the rest of the year, I create shows for other people to perform, which I enjoy just as much as performing. I really love the art of writing. 

I love getting to craft a story and watching other people bring it to life. Also, I can’t sing for toffee so I wouldn’t unleash that agony on a paying public. 

Were you a panto fan growing up?
Not massively. But that’s only because I never really went to any. Our school didn’t do any panto trips as far as I remember so it never really got into my blood in the way that it has for other people. It was only in later years, and, actually it was through watching the panto’s at Oran Mor, that I realised that it’s such a brilliant medium for satire and social commentary which is right up my street. 

Show seems more aimed at adults is that a statement about panto’s potential as a more mature entertainment?
I guess it is a little more adult, yes. But not in a Jim Davidson way. Far from it. I think that, yes, panto has the potential to be mature entertainment, but I think that’s always the case. When you go and see the best ones like Johnny McKnight’s or Brian James’, for example, they’re working on multiple levels; the kids love it because it works for them but the adults are hooked in as well on big laughs that are perhaps going over the kids heads, kind of like the Simpsons in that manner.

Panto’s always have so many themes relevant to everyone; hardship suffered by the poor, greed versus good, the toppling of evil empires, I think if the show was particularly mature in anyway, I guess it would be that with the knowledge that it is a venue that has a more mature audience as well, we’re freed up a little more to push these themes more to the direct political reference to what’s going on the world and so we’re able ramp up the satire a little. It’s also very very silly. 

That’s the joy of writing it with Dave, his comic timing is exceptional and he has real integrity in his work too because he cares a great deal about the world. And it helps that we can have a bloody good swear into the bargain. 

Is the show set in Glasgow? Will there be familiar characters to those of us that hang around the west end?
It’s set in panto land, of course. But it is peculiar how similar panto land can be to Glasgow at times.

Gary in his previous Xmas show...

Pantomime Ponderings

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

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.

Oh yes, it is.

Oh no, it isn't.