England invented panto but Glasgow makes it shine

Morning readers — forgive the unusual prelude to your Saturday read but just a quick note from us on The Bell's publishing schedule over the festive break. Like many of you, we will be taking the opportunity to rest a bit (forgive us!) so we'll be on a reduced schedule next week, and then taking six days off until 4 January. And now, on with the show as Ophira gets the jammiest assignment of the year in discovering why Glasgow and pantos go together like a pie and pint. Enjoy.

Panto started in England but in Glasgow it thrives. Ophira Gottlieb is on the Christmas beat to find out why.

As the old joke goes: I used to be in pantomime, but that’s behind me now. While attending a local drama club on Maryhill Road, I had the privilege of treading the boards of what was then the SECC, in a somewhat critically-neglected production of ‘Babes in the Woods’. Being five at the time, I didn't quite have the vocal dexterity required to play the leading lady, the rhyming abilities demanded by the role of Good Fairy, or thighs thick enough for any Dame. Instead, in typical panto fashion, me and my fellow youngsters were shepherded on stage for the length of a minute, to sing a solitary song about Pizza Hut that had nothing to do with the plot. The performance was ill-attended, perhaps due to the fact that the Black Eyed Peas were playing next door, and I never performed in theatre again, though I did go on to work at Pizza Hut for a while.

But two people in attendance that night still sing the praises of the production to this day. My parents, and me with them, had only recently moved to Glasgow, and my dad had never yet lived in the UK. Years later I’d remember him brushing up on British trivia for his UK citizenship test, but nothing proved more of a masterclass in the ways of the country, and of the Glaswegians, than that evening of theatre by the Clyde.

This is because Glaswegian pantos are entirely preoccupied with being Glaswegian. The main pantos in Edinburgh this year are as follows: ‘Cinderella’, ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, and ‘Oor Aladdin’. In Manchester: ‘Cinderella’ again, plus ‘Tinderella’: ‘Two Big Balls’, ‘One Happy Ending’. But in Glasgow? Apart from ‘Peter Pan’ at the Kings, there’s: ‘Beauty and the Beastie’, ‘Weans in the Wood(lands)’, ‘Maw Goose’, ‘Weegie Hink Ae a Panto?’, and of course, ‘Wizard of Oz – A Pure Wicked Glesga Panto’. Anyone who’s ever attended a panto in the city can attest to the density of location-dependent gags, resulting in performances that border on the inaccessible to any non-native audience members.

Scotland as a whole has long been known (at least among the Scottish) as the rightful home of the panto. The style of theatre originated in 16th century Italy with Commedia dell’Arte, and was converted to a form comparable with the pantos of today in 18th century London. 

But by the 19th century it was on our side of the border that people seemed most enchanted by the tradition. In 1956 author E. G. Ashton referred to Scotland as “pantomime daft,” and Joyce McMillan, theatre critic for The Scotsman, wrote that since the 1950s “perhaps because of the growth of a strong professional theater system in Scotland combined with the relative smallness of the Scottish stage community […] the Scottish panto scene has become perhaps the liveliest in Britain.” Moving into the new millennium, panto’s appeal was stronger than ever, so much so that University of Glasgow researchers conducted a three year study into the form’s cultural impact in Scotland. One datapoint revealed that 31% of the population either saw, or were involved with making a non-professional pantomime between 2008 and 2009, and that Scottish pantos represented 14% of total theatre revenues, with the 21 pantos studied generating £3.46m in wages.

The Scotland-wide enthusiasm for tit jokes and class commentary explored through the medium of song is unsurprising. But is Glasgow where that passion peaks? I went to the theatre to find out.

I begin my investigation at the adults-only matinee pantomime at Òran Mór. Not the most traditional location for the bawdy plays, I was enticed by the promise of panto-pie-pint, and was curious how the alternative panto compared with a ‘proper panto’ at the Pavilion, to be attended that evening. The other selling point of the Òran Mór panto is that, this year, they are putting on a production of ‘Weans in the Wood(lands)’ — a Glaswegian retelling of Babes in the Wood  — and I was interested to see who would reprise my role as ‘Pizza Hut chorus member’ (turns out no one can step up to the task).

By the second musical number it becomes apparent that, subversive as the Òran Mór spectacle is, the narrative still hews to the traditional panto theme of ‘class disparity’. While pantomimes generally grapple with such grand and philosophical concepts as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and ‘true love’ etc, beneath the surface most of them are effectively tales of finding happiness in a wad of cash. Classics like Cinderella and Dick Whittington go for the simple rags-to-riches plot line, while others like Robin Hood lean a little more Bolshevik, rather than making a case for social mobility. In the case of ‘Weans in the Wood(lands)’, the rags-to-riches narrative is flipped on its head. Carlotta Kelvinbridge (played by Karen Fishwick dressed entirely in H&M pink) is a west end girl, attending a private school with an endless name at which she is the only pupil. She dreams of studying law at the University of Glasgow, and settling down in Bearsden. This changes when she meets Shuggie (Cristian Ortega in a sparkling shell suit), a member of the Partick Cross young team and a self-proclaimed bam who’s shite at being a bam (the only thing he’ll be breaking, he assures us, is the fourth wall).

Through Shuggie, Carlotta becomes inspired to learn precisely how the other half lives, and she ventures with her new found bam into the woodlands — or, more specifically, a little wooded patch near Kelvingrove Park. Events vaguely reminiscent of ‘Babes in the Wood’ hang loosely around this central tension, with the plot propelled forward by Neil John Gibson as the Dame-cum-PE-Teacher, and Carmen Pieraccini as both the ‘evil boot’ villainesse, and a washed-up and aging Good Fairy.

As is customary with pantos, the plot is somewhat irrelevant and, by its own admission, convoluted. But class is fundamental to the whole experience. Pantomime’s explorations and subversions of class dynamics extend well beyond the stage boards, as they bring a larger working-class audience to the rather middle-class world of theatre. This is an intrinsic part of panto-history: by the 18th century, a working class man named John Rich had introduced harlequinades to English theatre, prompting an onslaught of accusations that such foreign entertainment “threatened the downfall of Shakespeare and the death of serious theatre.” But they drew a crowd, and crowds meant money, so while theatre managers scorned the art form, they were reluctant to get rid of it altogether. Instead, they confined the frivolous plays strictly to the Christmas season — an unwritten law that is upheld to this day.

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Emerging from the west end church basement, I kill a few hours and then head to the Pavilion. The city-centre theatre opened on a leap day back in 1904, and was one of a chain of flash new music halls that were sprouting up all over the country at the time. Glaswegians have been attending Pavilion pantos for over 100 years, and the theatre shares its music hall roots with the genre, as the modern pantomime is heavily derivative of Victorian-era variety shows. This year's show is Beauty and the Beastie — an outdated Glaswegianism as I soon discover that this year's beast is not, in fact, a bug, but just your average horned mythical creature.

Pavilion panto is traditional panto through and through. There’s clumsy child participation, nonsensical interludes, and that one rendition of ‘The 12 Days of Christmas’ with the three-titted bra. This time the plot is entirely irrelevant, and neither Beauty nor Beastie seem to get a quarter hour of stage time between them, as the panto is entirely dominated by comedian Liam Dolan in the non-canonical role of ‘Hector’ — a character that I initially found infuriating, but must admit to have warmed to by the end of the two-hour show. Beauty and the Beastie is just as chock-full of Glasgow references as this morning's play, but they cater to a different audience of children and their young parents, and are frequently football related. A prop of joined-up Celtic and Rangers shirts gets the loudest audience response of the night (an outraged ‘ooh’), and there’s a joke about a Partick Thistle bra having “very little support and nae cups” that fails to cause the same offence.

In the time-pressed queue for a glass of wine in the interlude I, by an uncommon stroke of luck, find myself standing behind a father and daughter discussing, in Yorkshire accents, the inaccessible density of Glaswegian jokes. Luckily I myself have lived in Yorkshire for the past five years, and so was able to translate well enough to conduct a brief interview.

Mark (father) lives in Holmfirth and Maddie (daughter) has been studying in Glasgow since September. “But we’re both from York originally,” Mark informs me. “That’s where life started.” Perfect; York is one of the most panto-philic cities in England, as the plays were made hugely popular there by actor Berwick Kaler’s 47-year-long stint as a pantomime Dame (plus writing and directing duties), a run that only ended last Christmas. Mark’s brother even used to appear in Kaler’s pantos as a child, in a role not dissimilar to my own. For both father and daughter, this is their first time at a Glasgow panto, but they’ve been to many over in York. “I think they’re very similar,” Mark says, “they all seem to follow the same kind of theme.” However, when I ask the pair if Glaswegian pantos seem more Glaswegian than York pantos feel York–y, they both answer a resounding ‘yes’. 

“It’s the dialect,” says Maddie, explaining that she found the Glasgow panto funnier than its York counterparts, precisely because she’s not a local. “I suppose if you come to Glasgow it’s kind of what you want,” Mark agrees. The pair admit that many of the jokes went over their heads, but they were swept along by the sheer degree of audience participation. “The people behind us were belly laughing at obviously quite regional jokes,” says Mark, “which is funny in itself, even if you don’t understand it. You just get carried along for the ride.” Maddie honed in on snippets of slang she’d picked up off her uni friends, while Mark, easily entertained, was delighted by the fact that women call each other ‘hen’. But he doesn’t think panto’s appeal translates further than UK borders. “We’ve got American friends,” says Mark, “and we took them to a[n English] pantomime once and they just didn’t get it. The humour doesn’t travel over the Atlantic”.

Writer Max Beerbohm once famously referred to pantomime as the only art form ever invented in England. But anything that crosses over onto Glaswegian soil is either cast out or made our own, and the Glaswegian panto is now an entity in and of itself that soars above its English and even Scottish counterparts in terms of its humour, its cultural relevance, and of course, its aching self-awareness. Perhaps it's the ever-present class consciousness of the Glaswegians that allows the art form to thrive here in the way that it does. Perhaps it's the excruciatingly hyper-local nature of Glaswegian humour. Either way, as a noble and revered veteran of the Glaswegian theatre industry myself, I can comfortably confirm that Glasgow is the true and rightful home of the Christmas panto. Oh yes it is.