ECHO 5/1/06

We are reaching the sad, ragged end of the panto run, the middle of the final week. Playing out in an absurd and forlorn sense whereby we are still operating in a festive mood, trying to maintain the magic of the past two weeks into the opening of the year while the rest of the population makes its way back to reality. Putting my make-up on feels a little futile and silly. Turning out the same gags that are stale now for us on stage, though somehow still manage to garner laughter from our rapidly depleted audiences. There are cold winds running along the riverside; rain is coming in, almost as if we are at the end of a pier out of season. The gifts we give at the end of the show are now wrapped in fading publicity posters as opposed to the brilliant gold paper of the previous weeks. Children cry more readily in the audience, confused by all the spangle and glitter on stage now that Xmas is forgotten. Or else the audience is full of OAPs from rest homes sitting there silently, falling asleep, heads nodding down and the spittle oozing. I look at my painted face in the dressing room mirror and some dusty images of the past seem represented there – vaudevillians out on their tails at the end of a job roaming round the country looking for another place to play out their stock characters; or else they are monsters from another time, dark creations become pariahs.

I wonder too about my experience of playing a Dame. It has been awkward and exhilarating at the same time. The Dame is the loose cannon, the trickster. As such she has no allies either on stage or in the audience because she blurs the boundaries of good and evil – one minute she is helping the protagonists or heroes, the next she is berating them or putting obstacles of her own devising in the way (more out of a sense of impish fun than of any evil motivation) which lead the audience, and most definitely the children, to find their affiliation with the character compromised. She also mocks the audience as much as she appeals to them. Then there is the gender swapping issue. The knowledge that there is a man beneath the make-up is both alienating as well as a cause for affection (in the British love of traditional camp comedy). For the children it is a sudden realization and leads to confusion on their part and, I suspect, fear; in many ways the dame is equally a ‘monster’ to them as the baddies’ own creations of evil (giant spiders and dragons in our case). The dame is discomforting I believe because she has no fixed character layer as such – in my case she comes on as a supposed caring Nurse (in the Mary Poppins tradition) and then rapidly peels away her outer layers to become a number of different personalities: saucy siren, though the gag is that she is too ugly to ever be attractive; maniac matron etc. All of which turn on a pinhead so that even these definitions remain slippery, she usurps herself at any moment and in that way is her own worst enemy. But the joy of being the dame comes when you realize that, as an actor, you are not going to get sympathy and that you have free reign to play and improvise and mock. The anarchic spirit can be let loose and there is nothing that can’t be possible fuel for the Dame’s humour; there are no ‘No’s’.