24 November 2007

The Scotsman

Sleeper hits of the season
SUSAN MANSFIELD & KELLY APTER

PROLOGUE
SLEEPING BEAUTY IS READING A thriller, the Wicked Witch is doing a crossword and Nanny Begood is locked in a debate with the director about whether "lavvy" is funnier than "toilet". (Answer: Yes, but not as funny as "cludgie".) Welcome to the wonderful world of the pantomime rehearsal.

The King's Theatre in Glasgow hosts the biggest traditional panto in Scotland (Oh, yes it does!). This year, director Tony Cownie, who did last year's Aladdin, returns with an all-singing, all-dancing production of Sleeping Beauty. His team includes panto veterans Elaine C Smith (as creative producer) and Gerard Kelly, as well as stand-up comic Karen Dunbar and actress Dawn Steele in their panto debuts.

To make a successful panto, you need the right ingredients and Kelly, who is in his 18th panto season, knows just what they are: "A strong narrative, a good storyline and plot that the kids can follow, equally weighted with good comedy, both setpieces and topical gags. And then a couple of good singers never go amiss."

But - and here's the rub - they have to do 76 performances, each as fresh as the last. "That's the thing about panto," says Kelly. "You can't fake it, you've got to enter into it. You all make it what it is."

SCENE ONE: THE MAIN CHARACTERS INTRODUCED
Cownie believes that the love story is the heart of panto. So enter the Prince and Princess (Michael Howell and Laura Donnelly) who will fall in love, and - many adventures later - deliver a happy ending, while belting out Every Day from High School Musical.

Cownie says: "It's important to make sure that the heart of the story works. That's a good counterbalance for the comedy. I've done a lot of work with Bob [Black], the writer, to make the Prince and Princess more substantial. To me it's very important that the love story is as real as possible - it makes the funny scenes funnier if you are following that story."

SCENE 2: THE OTHER MAIN CHARACTERS LINE UP
Everybody knows that the people who have the most fun in panto are rarely the Prince and Princess (particularly when the plot requires you to be asleep for half the show). That honour passes to the comic characters: the dame and her sidekick, in this case Nanny Begood (Karen Dunbar) and Chester the Jester (Kelly).

Kelly says: "That's the thing about pantomime - very rarely is the title role the star of the show. The stories are very much a vehicle for other characters, some invented just for panto. It takes a classic tale and subverts it for its own purposes."

SCENE 3: A GOOD BADDIE
"It's all about balance," says Cownie. "You need a love thing going on, and you need an evil presence as well, so you've got all the ingredients as evenly matched as you can. There's no goodness without badness, no love without its opposite."

In this politically correct age, panto is one of the few places where baddies are allowed to be unremittingly evil, and Steele (Monarch of the Glen, Tutti Frutti), playing wicked witch Carrion, has been working on her evil cackle.

"She's a glam witch," she grins. "It's a brilliant part. It's something that you can do that's over the top, and you can do it with relish. I hope I get booed as much as possible."

SCENE 4: GENDER SWAPPING
Kelly remembers being taken to his first panto at the age of nine and coming out puzzled. "In those days the principal boy was played by a girl. I do remember, as a wee boy, finding it slightly confusing!"

Like most Scottish theatres, the King's has now dispensed with the "principal boy" role, though the role of dame can be either male or female. Kelly wore the frock in a previous production of Sleeping Beauty. "The frock tends to do a lot of work, and because you're wearing high heels and a dress it's impossible to expound much energy," he says. "I found I got to a central spot on the stage and delivered gags, wandered off and stepped back on in the next fabulous-looking gown."

This year, Dunbar is wearing the dress, but the panto is not entirely free of cross-dressing. To say any more, however, would give the game away.

SCENE 5: BAD JOKES
"I have to say, without any irony whatsoever, that is a really nice pear," says Karen Dunbar, putting down her piece of fruit. She raises a giggle or two and a groan from the rehearsal room. But this is panto. The benchmark is: "What's round and nasty?" "A vicious circle!"

But there's more to panto humour than meets the eye. There needs to be a liberal helping of simple gags that the kids will enjoy, but a seasoning for the adults too. Some jokes will be so up-to-date they won't be added until the final rehearsals. "I think you used to get away with a lot more in panto than you can now," Cownie says. "They used to be a lot saucier. We've all got very PC about gender and sexuality and race - that's not entirely a bad thing. The sense of fun is very much still there."

Dunbar adds: "A lot of what I'm delivering are classic jokes, so the comedy background helps. It's the serious bits I've got to work on.

"I haven't got a lot of experience of being on stage with others. I need to remember that I'm not doing my own show, and that somebody's depending on me to say 'banana' so they can say 'kumquat'."

SCENE 6: OH YES IT IS
"It's the only form of theatre, apart from The Rocky Horror Show, where the audience come along not to judge in any way, they decide they're going to have a good time before they step in the door," says Kelly. And it's one of the few where audience participation is positively encouraged.

For the actors, that adds an element of the unknown. "A couple of years ago, I was playing Buttons in Cinderella," Kelly says. "So I was at the side of the stage crying because Cinders has run off with the prince. Adults always say they find that bit really sad. I looked down and there was a wee boy of about seven in the front row.

"I made the mistake of looking at him and he said: 'Get over it!' No sympathy there."

SCENE 7: MISHAPS
"There should be an element of anarchy to pantomime," says Kelly. "Audiences love to be there the night something went wrong. Panto is one of the few forms of theatre that if something goes wrong, you don't try to cover it."

Smith recalls playing Nanny Begood in an earlier Sleeping Beauty with Billy Boyd and Johnny Watson. "At one point Billy ran off, and Johnny had to run off behind him, but Billy got tangled up in Johnny's big pointy jester's shoes. They landed on top of each other in the wings. It was hilarious. I actually had to stop the show and say, 'I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, they're lying in a heap in there'."

SCENE 8: BACKSTAGE HI-JINKS
If you spot a dazed actor in panto make-up trying to do their Christmas shopping on Sauchiehall Street between shows, spare them a thought. The team at the King's will do 76 performances in six weeks - two per day on Saturdays, Christmas Eve and Boxing Day. "You have to do things backstage to keep yourself amused, keep yourself sane," says Still Game's Gavin Mitchell, who plays the witch's son, Norval. "Most of your life is in the theatre, it's tough to keep the energy going, you try to find happiness and sanity in any shape you can. It tends to get madder as time goes on.

"Last year we had a murder mystery game that involved the whole cast - somebody was going about slowly but surely bumping off all the characters. As soon as the curtain went down it would start again. And Steven [McNicoll] and I got into a competition with Barry Hunter over who had the best-decorated dressing room. Ours was a gentlemen's club."

Sometimes, backstage discussion can get pretty serious, too, Smith says. "Gerard Kelly and I are both very political animals, so he'd be on his laptop e-mailing the Israeli High Commission about offences in Palestine, and we'd be talking about the war in Iraq, with him dressed as Wishy-Washy and me as Widow Twankey."

• Sleeping Beauty is at the King's Theatre, Glasgow, from 30 November 30 until 12 January.

 

Taken from here