Latest news with #JohnnyMcKnight
The Herald Scotland
05-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Ever wondered about pantomime dames? Learn their secrets at this show
Traverse Theatre A good dame should grow old disgracefully. So says Johnny McKnight, and he should know. This dressed up doyen of twenty-first century pantomime has been at it for 20 years now, and has learnt a trick or two along the way he wants to share with us in this solo show and tell of his brilliant career. In order to do this, McKnight arrives on stage in full costume, make up and attitude as Dorothy Blawna-Gale, who has become a true friend, both to McKnight and young audiences who lap up her larger than life persona. Don't be fooled by the disguise, mind. Behind the extravagant wig, make up and gingham ensemble that liberates McKnight to reel off a stream of deadly one-liners, McKnight lays bare both his personal odyssey into the pantosphere while relating some of its colourful history. Read More: From a primary school kid enthralled by panto great Johnny Beattie, McKnight works his way up to don a frock to call his own. As he speaks directly with the audience, McKnight sets down the rules of Dorothy, essentially a bullet point guide to do and don'ts learnt the hard way through his anything goes early years. From dealing with complaints McKnight learns the art of staying true to one's muse whilst taking responsibility for his actions. Crucially, McKnight comes clean regarding his personal emancipation as a gay man as sex and sexuality come calling. Out of all this, McKnight retains an evangelical zeal for his artform, and sees panto as a genuinely subversive means of creative expression. Originally presented as this year's annual Cameron Lecture at the University of Glasgow in honour of former tutor Dr. Alasdair Cameron, McKnight's candid tour de force has been turned into a full production care of director John Tiffany. Tiffany sprinkles his own high-octane magic on to things in his National Theatre of Scotland/Traverse Theatre co-production. The result sees McKnight framed by Grant Anderson's pink hued lighting on Kenny Miller's star emblazoned showbiz set for a powerhouse of wisdom from the frontline of the original people's theatre. Apart from anything else, McKnight is a wonderful performer who looks totally at ease onstage in a work that celebrates pantomime's roots while looking to future possibilities in a show that should be required viewing for theatre scholars throughout the land. Until August 24, various times. For festival tickets, see here
The Guardian
05-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
She's Behind You review – Christmas comes early to Edinburgh with panto songs, sweets and subversive spirit
She stands before us in a blue gingham frock, towering wig and a 'hideous yet age-appropriate leisure shoe'. She is Dorothy Blawna-Gale and she is a pantomime dame. The creation of Johnny McKnight – Scotland's finest proponent of the form – she is sharp-tongued, lascivious and bumptiously lovable. Unlike her usual festive appearances at the Tron in Glasgow and the Macrobert in Stirling, she is here, out of season, not just to entertain – which she does in abundance – but to educate. In a show that grew out of a lecture at the University of Glasgow in memory of the late academic Alasdair Cameron, a champion of popular theatre, McKnight and director John Tiffany throw in songs, sweets and copious audience interaction to celebrate panto's radical potential. It is very funny, but the real soul of this tremendous show lies in the personal story McKnight tells. From his earliest memory of seeing Johnny Beattie at the Ayr Gaiety, when he realised 'You don't just see panto; panto sees you,' he takes us through his first tentative steps as an actor playing the comic silly billy role, hiding behind the character's asexual charm, and then, in 2006, his first dame. But something was wrong: in sticking so rigidly to tradition, the tired assumptions, the dated jokes, he was repressing his true self and muting the anarchic possibilities of the form. It was time to kill the old. In the coming seasons, he upended the cliches, corrected the gender balance and acknowledged his own sexuality. By 2018, he was fielding two male romantic leads in Mammy Goose and audiences did not just accept it: they demanded more. Along the way, he faced sectarianism, homophobia and serious ethical questions, but sticking to the principles of always punching up, thinking his choices through and representing the marginalised, he reclaimed panto's subversive spirit and made it, hilariously, his own. Oh yes he did. At the Traverse, Edinburgh, until 24 August. All our Edinburgh festival reviews.
The Herald Scotland
04-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
The Fringe show charting 20 years of Scottish pantomimes
McKnight will not only be in full panto dame costume throughout the performances of his show 'She's Behind You,' but will be venturing off stage for audience interaction, and reinventing some of his favourite material for the Fringe. Read more: The show, which will see McKnight revive his hugely-popular Dorothy Blawna-Gale character, will explore Scotland's enduring love affair with panto and how it can be traced back to the country's music hall traditions. It will also examine the dramatic changes the writer, director and performer has seen in the material performed on stage, audience tastes and attitudes, and how roles are cast. Johnny McKnight is appearing in the National Theatre of Scotland show She's Behind You. (Image: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan) She's Behind You will also be partly autobiographical as McKnight his own personal relationship with his on-stage alter egos. The late-night Traverse show, which has been jointly commissioned with the National Theatre of Scotland, has evolved from a talk delivered at Glasgow University less than 18 months ago. Johnny McKnight is the star of the Fringe show She's Behind You. (Image: Ian Georgeson) He had been invited to take part in a new lecture series instigated by former student John Tiffany, who would go on to become one of British theatre's most successful theatre directors, in honour of his former lecturer Alasdair Cameron. McKnight recalled: 'When John and I started talking, the lecture was really going to be about the history of pantomimes. I started doing a lot of digging, but when I was about half-way through it just felt that it wasn't something that I would do. 'We really started off again and it became about my own history as a pantomime dame. 'I wanted to look back over the last 20 years at how Scotland has shifted, how comedy has shifted and how panto looks now compared to 20 years ago. 'The show is about being a panto dame and what panto has meant to me. It's become autobiographical and a theatrical show set in the world of panto. 'It's a bit of a surprise to both of us that it is even happening given that the original lecture was only meant to be a one-off thing.' McKnight, who was brought up in Ardrossan in Ayrshire, can trace his panto story back to his first experience as an audience member when he was taken to the [[Ayr]] Gaiety theatre as a child. He said: 'I remember being absolutely terrified when the dame come out in the audience. 'My favourite thing about panto is doing audience interaction stuff and terrorising people. 'There is something definitely weird that a therapist should probably to me about in that the thing I was most terrified about is the thing I love most about panto. 'I can still remember that feeling of danger of suddenly being part of the show.' McKnight, who studied at the then Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, got his first panto work at the Carnegie Hall, in Dunfermline, working with Scottish comedy writer and performer Tony Roper, who was directing its annual production. He recalled: 'Tony was brilliant. We had 10 days to rehearse and he taught me everything. I really took it for granted at the time. 'After the first preview, he pulled me aside and said: 'I'll be back in a week. Don't you be saying these same words. You listen to the audience. Don't care about the rest of the actors on stage. This is for the audience. Keep it alive. Don't stick to the script.' 'I just assumed that's what you were meant to do in panto. He taught me so much.' McKnight can recall the 'cultural appropriation' in the first versions of Aladdin he performed in and the male-dominated casts he appeared in, but also the impact on pantos of key political decisions, such as the legalisation of gay marriage in Scotland. Tiffany, who started his theatre career working at the Traverse, said he had first developed an interest in Scottish pantomimes while he was studying in Glasgow He said: 'I grew up in Yorkshire. Every year we would get on coach and go with my dad's company to see one of the big commercial pantos in Manchester. 'There would always be folk off the TV in them, like Cannon and Ball, or Little and Large. 'It was always great fun, but it was only when I moved to Glasgow, started studying theatre and went to the pantos at the King's Theatre with actors like Gerard Kelly that I realised it was an art form alongside the ones I was learning about. 'The pantos felt political – they punched up, instead of down. I became really interested in it as an art form.' McKnight has worked extensively on the pantos at the Macrobert Arts Centre in Stirling and the Tron [[Theatre]] in Glasgow over the last 20 years. He said: 'We take panto seriously in Scotland. Theatres that don't produce anything throughout the whole year still want to make a panto which is specific to their panto. Audiences that don't come out the rest of the year will all come out for that show. 'I think it comes down to the fact that our theatre history in Scotland is music hall, it's not Shakespeare. 'It feels like panto is embedded in our culture. It comes back to the fact that you're guaranteed a good night out. Good will triumph. 'The audience are there to have a laugh, they're there to have a good night out and have the previous year reflected back at them. 'The people on stage are there to make them laugh about crap stuff like the fear of welfare bills getting cut and sort of find a punchline for stuff that might be unbearable. 'I read so many articles about people saying had their night at the theatre ruined by people singing. When did we get so po-faced in a theatre so that singing has become a joyless activity? In panto, you want people to join in and shout out. You want it to feel anarchic and fun. 'I did an Adele song one year and the weans would all join in. I felt like Robbie Williams at Knebworth, although I didn't sound like him! The audience sing along because they love it, not because they're bored.' Tiffany, a regular collaborator with the National Theatre of Scotland since he directed one of its first productions, Black Watch, is back working on a Traverse festival show for the first time since the award-winning play Gagarin Way - by the same writer, Gregory Burke, in 2001. He said: 'I've taken work to a lot of festivals around the world since then. But there is just nothing to touch Edinburgh. 'When we knew there was going to do a three-week run of She's Behind You I said to Johnny that I wouldn't only do it if he actually learned the script! 'We're kind of taking all the accoutrements and transposing them into the world of the Fringe. There will be songs, call and response, shout outs, terrible old jokes and a lot of audience interaction. 'We have gone for a late-night slot. A slightly merry Traverse audience is going to be perfection for us.' To purchase tickets, please click here
Scotsman
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Johnny McKnight on his fabulous one-dame Edinburgh Fringe show She's Behind You
Christmas comes early as Johnny McKnight explores the history and cultural significance of the classic Scottish panto dame in his uproarious show at the Fringe. By David Pollock Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... 'I love panto in Scotland, because I think it's different to panto anywhere else,' says actor and writer Johnny McKnight, who's carved a successful career as one of Scotland's most outrageous and effective pantomime dames through his work at Glasgow's Tron Theatre and Stirling's Macrobert Arts Centre. 'Here an actor can be in Medea for the National Theatre, then a month later be on stage at the Macrobert as the Silly Billy, and there's no stigma attached. Panto is theatre for families, it's telling a story, it needs to be well-acted. Music hall's our Shakespeare, it's what our theatre's built on, so we take it seriously.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Johnny McKnight in She's Behind You | Contributed McKnight puts that seriousness to the test this Fringe with She's Behind You, a one-dame show played in character as his outrageous drag creation Dorothy Blawna-Gale. An hour of late-night comedy in the panto tradition, albeit taking the genre out of its traditional pre-Christmas environment, it's also a subversive storytelling dissection of the genre, McKnight's relationship with it and the very nature of theatre as an evolving mirror of the times. Make sure you keep up to date with Arts and Culture news from across Scotland by signing up to our free newsletter here. She's Behind You began life as the second of the Cameron Lectures at the University of Glasgow's Bute Hall in February 2024, with McKnight following in the footsteps of inaugural speaker Alan Cumming. These lectures were founded by John Tiffany, director of apex Fringe hit Black Watch and the West End's Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, in honour of his late former lecturer Alasdair Cameron, under whom Tiffany studied Theatre and Classics at the University in the early 1990s. 'Johnny let loose on a merry festival audience at the Traverse is going to be something to behold,' says Tiffany, who also directs She's Behind You (like Black Watch, it's produced with the National Theatre of Scotland). 'The whole point about these lectures is that they're not really lectures, they're performance art. I knew Johnny's would be hilarious, but it was also raw, honest, heartbreaking and incredibly life-affirming. He managed to articulate the bare bones of what pantomime is, that it's political, it's subversive, it's anarchic and it can be a real force for good.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad From detailing his biggest influences in pantomime, including Johnny Beattie, Janette 'Jimmy Krankie' Tough and Elaine C Smith, that lecture became about so much more than just a history of pantomime. 'I was thinking about the difference in what panto looks like in the 20 years I've been doing it, in terms of gender makeup, cultural appropriation, in terms of how the world's changed and moved forward, or in some places hasn't,' says McKnight. 'When I first started we were still doing Aladdin dressed up like we were Chinese people, and that's not entirely banished. It was 90% men onstage, with one woman who never got a punchline, she was just there to look pretty for the dads. Yet there's always a new generation that fights against that and does even more unexpected, brilliant, push-it-forward stuff. It keeps changing, that's why panto's survived so long.' As well as digging into the medium, She's Behind You is McKnight's personal journey. 'It's about what I've discovered about being a man by being a panto dame, and what I'm still trying to figure out about the world through doing it,' he says. 'I'd only just come out when I started being a dame, so there's me in a dress talking about being a mother, and actually I was still trying to find myself sexually.' The lecture went down a storm. Once word got round, McKnight was invited to give a repeat performance at Glasgow's Pavilion Theatre earlier this year. 'I'd never stood on the Pavilion stage before, that was a dream come true,' he says. 'I just wanted to know what it was like, because when you're talking about panto there's so much that's connected to the Pavilion. 'Janette Krankie Beanstalk Horror', I've a poster of that headline from the Daily Record in my office looking down at me while I work.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Everyone who was at the Pavilion that Sunday afternoon raved about it, and now She's Behind You has arrived in Edinburgh, where the fast-talking, Scots-accented McKnight promises to 'pronounce those Ts and Ds' for an international audience, but absolutely not water down the comedy or dumb down the message. Who knows where it will go after this? 'I came off stage at the Pavilion and felt I was ready to die in an aircraft accident, it was like a retirement party or a farewell tour,' laughs McKnight. 'But it turns out it's Cher's farewell tour and it lasts about 20 years.'
The Herald Scotland
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Scottish stories being told at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
With new shows and events being added every week to the line-up, here are just a few highlights from the ever-expanding programme that is taking shape. Read more: When Billy Met Alasdair, Scottish Storytelling Centre: Award-winning writer Alan Bissett's show is inspired by an encounter between Sir Billy Connolly and Alasdair Gray when the comic met the writer at the launch of his novel Lanark in 1981. Bissett, who is best known at the Fringe for The Moira Monologues, will be exploring the 'origins stories,' struggles and triumphs of Connolly and Gray in a show given a sneak preview at this year's Glasgow Comedy Festival. The birdlife of Shetland has inspired Kathryn Gordon's Fringe show A Journey of Flight. (Image: Supplied) A Journey of Flight, Dace Base: Choreographer Kathryn Gordon has created immersive experience inspired by the birdlife of Shetland, where she lives. Dance, live music and visual projects will be combined to explore themes of arrivals, departures, place and flight. The piece, which was created in Shetland is aimed at encouraging audiences to 'reflect on the delicate balance between 'nature, movement and our emotional ties to place and each other.' River City and Shetland star Gail Watson will be appearing in Faye's Red Lines at the Fringe. Windblown, Queen's Hall: A palm tree removed from Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden after more than 200 years has inspired a new stage from award-winning singer-songwriter Karine Polwart. The Sabel bemudana palm was removed last year from the tropical palm house after outgrowing the building, which is currently closed for refurbishment. The tree, which had been transported to the attraction in the 1820s from its previous home on Leith Walk, had 'outgrow' the building and was said to be too frail to be relocated again. Johnny McKnight will be performing his pantomime-inspired stage show She's Behind You at this year's Fringe. (Image: Traverse Theatre) Polwart's show will imagine the poetic and musical voice of the tree in what she describes as 'an exploration of historical legacies, ecological loss, collective ritual and the multi-generational promise of gardens.' She's Behind You, Traverse Theatre: Scottish theatre-maker Johnny McKnight will be reflecting on 'a lifetime spent in pantomimes' in the one-man show he is creating with award-winning director John Tiffany, who was at the helm of the recent Edinburgh stage hit Wild Rose. McKnight, who has written more than 30 pantos and played 18 dames himself, will be looking back at his personal experiences across 20 years of Scottish production. The show, which is being adapted from a lecture McKnight delivered in full custom for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, is expected to be exploration of identity, courage and acceptance. The Traverse has billed She's Behind You as 'a celebration of shifting traditions and the unexpected beauty found in the anarchy of pantomime.' Faye's Red Lines, Gilded Balloon: River City and Shetland actress Gail Watson portray a woman with a paralysing fear of intimacy in Rab C Nesbitt creator Ian Pattison's play. The character played by Watson, who starred alongside Andy Gray and Jordan Young in last year's Gilded Balloon hit Chemo Savvy, will confront her long buried past and her solitary life. Skye: A Thriller, Summerhall: The Isle of Skye provides the backdrop to best-selling author and theatre producer Ellie Keel's debut play. It explores the events which unfold when four siblings on holiday believe they saw their their father on a beach four years after he passed away. The show is billed as 'a relentless search for the truth, on a rugged island where real people and ghosts seem to walk hand in hand among the mountains and lochs.' 24 Weeks, Gilded Balloon: The debate over reproduction rights in Scotland has inspired a play set in a not-so-distant future Scotland where abortion has been made illegal. The show focuses on the relationships between three friends who are divided on what to do when one of them falls pregnant.
