The village down the road do a pantomime every year. Two performances on one Saturday in February. Small cast, who all know each other, practices every Sunday since September. What could go wrong? Well, everything actually, but that didn't stop it getting a louder round of applause than Berwick Kaler the week before Christmas. You see, an audience goes to a village panto with similar needs as they would have for a professional one. They want to see over the top behaviour, chaos and people looking very stupid. The only difference between the two is that the chaos you see on stage at the Theatre Royal every year is stage-managed to the last detail. The chaos you would have seen last Saturday at the village hall was entirely unplanned and totally unscripted. But could the audience tell the difference? I imagine so. Did they care? Of course not! The first contributor to the chaos is the script. Or rather, not knowing what's on it. Minutes before curtain up, villagers in a variety of long dresses, peasant skirts, tights and robes are wandering round the kitchen and the back room clutching scripts, muttering lines and walking into each other. It makes little difference. Lines just tend to drift in and out of the head at will. Generally out as you walk on and in as you exit. Those that do remain in you head emerge in the wrong order, a problem afflicting everyone from the king and his princesses to the humble peasant. And even the owl, who had a very important cue line which she said two pages early, sending the stage crew into complete confusion. Alternatively, the lines appear in the right order, but are suddenly very funny in a way you never saw before. For example, Prince Jack, naturally female and in hot pants, suddenly found the little line 'Never give in!' very amusing and dissolved into hysterics, followed by princess one, peasants one, two and three and the king's two servants. At the matinee, this was one of the few things that genuinely amused the audience. The other was the 'special effects'. The best of these was undoubtedly the moment when the evil Ice Wizard turned Jack, our unlucky hero, to ice. Jack sinks to the floor conveniently near the wing (I know, technically this is plural, but we only have one, which doubles as the snooker room
) and several hands push a large sheet of plastic mottled with silver paint in front of her. Jack's hands stuck over the top to support it. The audience went wild! And the technology just got better. Jack needed to prove she was still alive while encased in ice. She held up a heart shaped piece of red cellophane and flashed a torch behind it. Jack needed to walk in high wind. A stagehand hung off two pieces of elastic attached to her cloak. We also had some rather fantastic foam snowdrifts, the only problem being that they need moving around between scenes. Fortunately this was sorted years ago, with Hail Blithe Spirit arriving to amuse the audience while snowdrifts were moved, trees appeared and pillars fell over. Apparently she's less of a fire hazard than a curtain
And don't forget the costumes. Without a doubt, Puck the Super Elf took the award for this, running the full length of the hall, one arm outstretched, in tights, a green cloak and large plastic ears, one of which repeated fell off and at one point he had to search for it in the audience. The other costumes were a mix of made, borrowed, begged and saved in the director's attic from previous years. Quick changes being the norm, a lot of cloaks were also utilised. Oh, yes, and not forgetting the dame's belly dancing costume (another thing that genuinely amused the matinee audience - the fact the top of her costume kept escaping) and the Morris dancers. Argh! My friends have seen me with bells tied to my legs. I will never, ever live it down! Of course, the main thing that makes for chaos is the audience themselves. The matinee audience, as I may have mentioned, were rather difficult to please. On the other hand, the evening audience laughed at anything, particularly the little boy on the fourth row back who became very worried when we couldn't see the unicorn behind us. This worry obviously stayed with him, as when a cast member later stated that 'we need to find a unicorn, and we don't know what they look it', he shouted very loudly, 'It's a black one!' We presented him with the cardboard unicorn at the end, to his delight and his parent's horror (it was at least a metre tall and attached to a large piece of firewood
). So, having listed all the surprises and all that went wrong, I shall end how I started. We provide a service people want. We are prepared to forget lines, prop up scenery and generally look silly on a Saturday evening for their amusement. And they love it! But not as much as we do
Ann
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