He's Behind You! The Rules of British Pantomime — Epoche B1
Oh yes it is: the theatre that needs you to shout Britain keeps one kind of theatre where the audience's lines are as fixed as the actors', and it fills the weeks around Christmas. It is called pantomime, and if you judge it by the rules of ordinary theatre — sit still, stay quiet — you have misread the ticket. A panto is a fairy tale — Cinderella, Aladdin, Jack and the Beanstalk — performed on top of a set of duties the audience already knows. When the villain enters, he is booed; he expects it and waits for it. When something creeps up behind the hero, several hundred children scream "He's behind you!", and the hero, by rule, turns the wrong way. Any argument runs "Oh no it isn't!" — "Oh yes it is!", with the whole hall taking a side. The hero's mother, the Dame, is played by a man in ever-larger dresses. There is a song the audience must sing, usually one half of the room against the other, and sweets may be thrown. Alongside the children's jokes run jokes pitched over their heads, so that three generations sit in one row laughing at different lines. I took a friend from Madrid to one last December. She spent the first ten minutes asking me why nobody stopped the children, and the last hour shouting with them. Consider what the form assumes, and the noise stops looking like chaos. Half the scenes are built to fail without the audience: the warning must be screamed, the argument must be answered back. And for many regional theatres, these loud December weeks pay for much of the quiet year. The one show where the crowd refuses to behave is the one that keeps the building open. References Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books.