Panto: Sleeping Beauty
Programme texts:
- The Panto
- The People:
- The Plot
- A Word from...
Additional Material
- Read the original script
- Listen to the original soundtrack
- Look at the pictures
- Watch the original movie (now on DVD!)
- Download the Original Programme.
Performances
February 2 to 5, 2006 in Mappamondo Theatersaal Bern.
A word from...
...the director
The traditional English pantomime is a funny thing: funny, ha!ha! but also funny, very peculiar! To begin with, it is entirely different from the continental type of silent mime and almost completely unique to England, not even following the British imperialists, as they exported their other strange rigmaroles, such as afternoon tea and cricket, to the farthest corners of the world. It remained very much a part of popular entertainment on the British Isles.
It evolved in its modern form over the last 150 years, especially in Victorian England, having obvious kinship to the music hall, but came into its own in the early twentieth century as a special family show that was put on at Christmas. It has never looked back. In London and the cities around Britain, there are literally dozens of pantomimes still being performed every year. However, many of he elements of patomime go back much further than that and stem from that rich tradition of English drama which has its roots in the early Middle Ages, but perhaps more than any other theatrical genre, it manages to draw on almost every kind of drama that has ever appeared on the English stage. Much is made of its ancestry in the Italian commedia dell'arte which has influenced theatre throughout Europe but, in fact, it owes more to home-grown characteristics of drama and literature which can be traced in one form or another over the last five hundred years of English theatre. The most modern feature, stangely enough, is perhaps the fairy tale plot, which came increasingly to be popular in Victorian times with the rise of interest in entertainment and literature for children.
Most of the other elements of the form have a longer lineage. Comedy, whether it is, satire, caricature, parody, punning have been around for years and the sheer absurd farce has been a mark of popular theatre from the Shepherd's Play in the Wakefield Cycle and surely before, to Monty Python of today. For the mixture of potential tragedy, as in the deadly curse on Rose, with comedy and the happy ending, along with the magic, one need only look to Shakespeare's The Tempest, and to the joys of cross dressing, to As You Like It, in which a boy actor plays the girl who plays the boy who plays the girl. The Principal Boy, where a girl plays the boy was a more recent trend, which developed at the end of the eighteenth century out of ballet on one hand and burlesque on the other, and then became in time the risqué charmer of today.
Then no pantomime would be complete without music and song, and needless to say, there has to be love, as romantic and sentimental as can be, as well as tons of nasty evilness; not to mention, all fun and silliness that please children and those of us, not so young, who would like to keep in touch with our childhood. It is, in other words, the mixture of all these things, thrown into a cauldron and stirred that gives pantomime it's very special flavour.
Finally, one ancient tradition, vital to pantomime, is audience participation, which takes us back to the popular street theatre of the Medieval pageant, when the audience argued with the actors during the perfomance and let their feelings be known when a "goody" or a "baddy" came on stage, which you, dear audience are warmly invited to do. The actors will be disappointed if you do not hear them, but even more disappointed if they don't hear you.
...the scribbler
It's been almost four years and the prospect of writing another Panto after such a long time and only a year after Upstage did their Cinderella did little to calm nerves and make me sit down to the task with great confidence. Being present at rehearsals and seeing what this cast of students did with what is after all only words on a page has given me a great deal of pleasure. I feel this mainly new student cast was chosen by a competent director, always a relief to a script writer, and that the students have brought a lot of energy and selflessness to this production.
For me a special joy was to work with Matt Kimmich on the music. Not only do we complement in each other (Matt can read and write music, I can't; Matt's focused when we work on a tune, I mess around; Matt's work on a song develops from his idea what the lyrics are about; I hope that in one way or another words will somehow fit a catchy tune) but once we had the basic concept, the combination of a chamber music ensemble with a pop group, we were on our way. I suppose, once our families and close friends have forgotten about these tempestuous times, which are so much part of the final weeks of a theatre production, we may explore this working relationship further, not so much in the vein of Lennon and McCartney, Leiber and Stoller or Rogers and Hart, more like Eric and Idle. I know which one I'll be, naturally...
...M. Pressario
No ona is alloweda to leava the theatre withouta soma heavy singinga. So 'era isa the chorus ofa the lasta songa,
"Happy ever after"
- Chorus:
- Happy ever after, that's how the story goes,
Lots of love and laughter, everyone knows.
Though this song gets dafter, it keeps you on your toes,
Happy ever after and so ... - Last time:
- Happy ever after, that's how the story goes,
Lots of love and laughter, everyone knows.
Though this song gets dafter, it keeps you on your toes,
Happy ever after for Jules and Rose.
Move on to: Additional Material