After a tough year for theatre, our chief critic celebrates the joy of the Christmas show, while five festive performers reveal how it feels to be waiting in the wings
Remember your first ever Christmas show – its sparkle and magic, its tinsel and thrall? I watched my first pantomime in 1978, though I couldn’t have named it as such. I was six, and still acclimatising to the shock of leaving sun-soaked Lahore to migrate to the greyest of London winters. I was led into the school hall where I sat, legs folded, with no friends and no word of English. I remember the curtain opening to a hirsute dame playing a guitar, and a half-hearted pantomime horse with elbows and heads poking out of its sides. An explosion of boos, whoops and shrieks. Classmates shouting, teachers hissing. What madness was this, and how had it managed to crack the room open to such rapture?
That first rickety school panto left me with an abiding, child’s delight for Christmas shows. Like many Muslims (and Jews, Hindus, Sikhs), I did not grow up celebrating Christmas. But I have embraced the great British tradition of the Christmas show, from the lovable mayhem of an end-of-year school play to the dazzle and splash of a West End production, the stupendous ensemble of a Royal Opera House staple such as The Nutcracker, right up to my annual family pantomime, which last year turned out to be a retelling of Cinderella featuring a same-sex romance between a stepsister and a female Buttons.
