4 days ago
Pantomime is still a boy's club, bemoans (male) dame
A pantomime dame who has taken the Edinburgh Festival by storm this summer has laid bare his frustration at the genre's marginalisation of women.
Johnny McKnight, whose award-winning Fringe show She's Behind You is based on a lecture he delivered at the University of Glasgow last year, said funny women had been erased from the 200-year-old history of an art form which 'needs to bring itself into the modern world'.
'Some people are still in discussion in panto about whether women are funny which blows my mind,' he said.
'There are some brilliant women in panto; Catherine Tate, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and Elaine C Smith … she has been flying that flag up in Scotland on her own for 20-plus years.
'Most theatres have their regular people and most of those seem to be men. If you look at traditional pantos then the women don't have any agency. She is just there waiting for Prince Charming. And then sometimes if that is changed then people jump on the bandwagon, saying we have got overly woke.'
McKnight has played 18 dames and written more than 30 pantomimes. In his latest show he says that in 2007 he attempted the 'daring' feat of having an equal gender split.
He tells audiences at the Traverse Theatre: 'Since then we've reversed every kind of part. A female Aladdin. A Snow White that was too smart to eat the poisoned apple — but Prince Charming did. A female Silly Billy … the shows, I think, got better — funnier, wilder, fresher — because the cast was.
IAN GEORGESON
'You'd have thought 17 years on that might have rippled through to all the big commercial pantos … maybe next year.'
McKnight told The Times: 'Women have been forgotten or erased from the history books a bit. They have never been remembered with the same sort of grandeur as your Rikki Fultons and Stanley Baxters. They were relegated to look pretty. I would love to see that women were getting just as big a chance to be funny on stage.'
While Christmas pantomimes remain a critical cash generator for regional theatres they are still seen in some quarters as being too low-brow, as well as containing problematic subject matter.
McKnight rejected the former charge, saying 'populism seems to have become a dirty word weirdly enough just in theatre', but acknowledged the latter.
'There are criticisms of panto that it is racist, homophobic, misogynistic and ageist; all of which is true,' McKnight said. 'But I would argue that is true for almost every art form.
'I think though that we have used 'it's tradition' as a way of not catching up and realigning our values with what audience values are now.
'I love panto but I'm also aware that we have to keep up to date or, like any art form, we will be in danger of dying.
'Panto should be subversive and anarchic and mock the time that we live in. And the brilliant thing is that you can bring these stories forward and not be stuck in the past.'
