Christmas Pantomime

The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs, Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands.

When William Blake wrote these lines he had been touched by the spectacle of English children, more than a hundred years ago, at a Holy Thursday service in St. Paul's. But his lines describe, no less perfectly, the thousands of little boys & girls who, this Christmas season as for centuries past, swarmed into the theaters of Britain for the Christmas Pantomime. And they describe what went on in the spirits of many men & women who had come along, nominally, to tend incontinent noses and to retrieve lost toys and mittens, but who were there, in deeper fact, to recapture a few hours of vanished childhood.

This year some 140 pantomimes are playing in Great Britain. They are at their broadest and, in an old-fashioned way, at their best, in the provinces. In London the best of the revue artists take part, but panto-purists complain that the old fairy tales and the old simplehearted clowning are ever more laggingly interrupted by variety turns of performing dogs, conjurers, acrobats and midgets.

Whatever the side dishes, every panto worthy of the name is sure to contain the following ingredients:

P: As its basic scenario, one (or more) of the ancient fairy tales or legends--Cinderella, Puss in Boots, Aladdin, Babes in the Wood, Dick Whittington, Mother Goose. Sometimes these are weirdly blended: this year's Red Riding Hood features Mother Hubbard and Simple Simon. Most modern admissions to the panto-Pantheon: Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan. The eternal favorite: Cinderella.

P:One Demon King or Witch.

P: One Fairy (with wand).

P: A Principal Boy (played in tights, by a leggy girl) and Girl (played by the fluffiest girl available) to provide suitable dramatic interest and sing popular current duets.* (This year's songs in Mother Goose: Bless You, To Each His Own.)

P:A Dame (mother of Boy or Girl), impersonated by a male comic.

P: A Baron or Wicked Uncle, who invariably demands rent from the Dame on pain of eviction into a cold and snowy world.

P:Two slapstick henchmen and a village policeman.

P:A panto cat, goose, monkey, donkey or horse, which romps amidst the audience and is played, as a rule, by some little old man who has donned his moth-eaten pelts every Christmas for the past 40 years.

P: A Transformation Scene in which, at a wave of the Fairy's wand (and a brief, rumbling blackout), rags become riches and poor hovels, palaces.

The Christmas pantomimes have not been wholly pure--i.e., perfectly silent--for a long time. Singing & dancing have been customary since 1723, spoken dialogue since 1814. The great joy of every panto player is the matchless exuberance of his audience. Last year Nervo & Knox, two fine slapstickers with 26 years in panto, so worked up their youthful audience against the Baron (Variety Artist Eddy Gray) that he could not speak his lines for the din; when Nervo yelled, "Come on, kids, let's kill the Baron," more than a hundred of them stormed on to the stage and stopped the show.

* For a few years, the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose played the Principal Boy and Girl in a palace pantomime; but since 1944, it has been felt that they were a little mature for tights.

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