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It may be yet another indication of the onset of my second childhood, but I have for some years hankered to take to the stage, not to play King Lear nor revive the role of Mathias in The Bells (as Wolfit did in Camden Town when there was still a theatre there), but, for one night only, to become the Widow Twankey in Aladdin. Only once did I ever see this pantomime - at the Coliseum, the Stoll or the Lyceum in their glory days - and I have a joyful childhood memory of the Widow's kitchen reduced to utter chaos by the flinging hither and thither of plucked capons and full flour bags. That is what I want to do.
Twenty years ago or so, thinking that something of this tomfoolery might still survive, I took a godson to a panto in a wretched little theatre in Euston Road, and was treated, not to mayhem, but to a morality play for smug children in whom had been instilled goody-goody Left-wing tendencies. I have since eschewed the genre but this year, at my local fleapit, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs appeared with Ross Kemp, a friend of sorts, included in the cast; the longing rankled and at last I went.
Ross was, alas, miscast: his role villainous, they dressed him as a Zorro pupped by a Molière fop, gave him the exaggerated manners of a frequenter of the molly-house with speech of unsustainable refinement, and made him subservient to a shrill and wicked queen.
As for the other stars, Snow White would have been wiser to make a career brewing cappuccini in a coffee bar, the Prince of Lombardy was as lively as the corpse of Suleiman the Magnificent on his impaling stick, and Muddoos, an amiable ass, was muddled enough to address Snow White as Cinderella.
The music was electronic, the volume 153 decibels, the script by a witless teenager who failed his English GCSE, and the first act was marginally longer than a complete Parsifal. Redemption lay in the hands of the Seven Dwarfs: six of them bowled onto the stage with "We're one short ... oh no we're not, we're all short," the enchanting seventh, disconcertingly, a miniature Ronnie Corbett.
I have twice in my long life walked out of a performance - from The Magic Flute in Copenhagen, sung in Danish, and from Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre at the ENO in 1982 (set, I seem to recall, on top of a bus on the North Circular Road at Neasden), and now from this pantomime without an orchestra, without a serried rank of Tiller Girls, without a flying ballet and without a kitchen scene, but with Ross Kemp. Dear friend, if you can't stick to being an amiable brute, try the entertainment of the pétomane rather than the pantomime, for you could hardly be worse at it. You have quite killed my ambition to play the Widow Twankey.
