It's Panto time! (Oh no it isn't!)

Dick Whittington at Richmond Theatre, 2023-2024

A traditional Christmas in the UK would not be complete without a trip to the local pantomime. Each year, theatres fill up with families eager to see TV, music and (in recent years) social media stars take to the stage in a fairytale adapted for the modern age, with songs, audience participation and usually some sweets thrown into the audience. Some of the most common pantos are Aladdin, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and The Snow Queen, but the stories are always written afresh and often contain local in-jokes.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a British tradition, panto has its roots abroad. 'Commedia dell-Arte' was a sixteenth-century Italian style of entertainment which made use of stock characters, such as Harlequin, Pantaloon and Pierrot, and a mixture of dance, music and acrobatics to tell a story. By the eighteenth century, this style of performance had made its way to London. The early pantomimes were based on classical stories and set to music, but often lacked speech.

One performer, John Rich, built Covent Garden Theatre with the profits he made playing Harlequin. He developed the Harlequinade, a chase scene mimed with music and featuring plenty of slapstick and comedy. Meanwhile, across London at Drury Lane Theatre the actor-manager David Garrick introduced speech into these productions and employed a writer to create new stories, often drawing on established English folk tales like Dick Whittington and Robin Hood. As pantomime evolved, topical satire also became part of the productions and classical stories were less popular. The success of Joseph Grimaldi's Clown in Mother Goose at Covent Garden also helped to make the Clown more popular in panto, replacing Harlequin.

In the 1830s, elaborate scenery and stage effects grew increasingly popular, and the lifting of the spoken word restriction in theatres with the Theatres Act of 1843 meant that theatres without a royal patent could produce plays with purely spoken dialogue. Pantomimes therefore began to incorporate spoken word, puns and audience participation on a wider scale, and began to be more like the pantos we know and love today, with 'principal boys' played by women (which is actually less popular these days) and 'pantomime dames' played by men.

I was brought up on panto. From a very young age, I was taken to the theatre to see a pantomime every year by my paternal grandparents. We always went in January, and it was lovely to counteract the gloom of the post-Christmas winter with a bright and cheerful pantomime. My brother and cousins came too, but by the end there was only me, aged seventeen, with my granda and grandma, my cousins having left home to go to university and my younger brother, aged fifteen, having cried off.

I go to pantomimes much less often these days - them being chiefly a family thing, and often children's first experience of theatre - but when I do I enjoy the silliness and the adult humour I didn't appreciate when I was young. Non-Brits may remain baffled by them, but for me they are a unique and to-be-celebrated part of British culture.

Jack and the Beanstalk at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, 1899-1900