Oh no it isn't!

Ahh, the great British Pantomime. 

Fun for the whole family: girls in hot-pants pretending to be boys, grown men in dresses pretending to be old dames, an angry, shouting mob for an audience and a lot of arcane rules that you just have to be born here to know about.  For example when does one shout "He's behind you!", does the audience start with "Oh yes it is!" or "Oh no it isn't!"? Do we boo the baddies and cheer the goodies, or just one or the other?

The extravaganza I saw yesterday was The Village Players production of The Three Musketeers in a tiny village hall the other side of the Severn at Elmore. My cousin Norman was playing the villainous Le Chevalier Lobster Roquefort. See how the gags work, this one was pretty simple, basically lots of anti-French gags and jokes about eating snails. Which is a perfect evening out if you ask me.

It was the first Panto I've been to for donkey's years and it was a laugh. However it was difficult for me to watch and turn off my critical faculties. As some of you know even though I am involved in the theatre I don't actually like going to see plays. I can't stop noticing the dodgy sets and dodgy acting. Not that there was any of that in Elmore. Well not much anyway. What amazed me most was the number of young blokes involved. Whenever we did a play that needed fellas in Kalgoorlie you'd be lucky to get two turn up. Must be something in the water. Or more accurately it looks like there is nothing else to do in this part of the world. I mean Elmore doesn't even have a pub!

So I had a good time, but not as much as the little kids in the audience who were very vocal in their booing and shouting. Actually they were pretty chatty all the time. That is the the major thing about panto, the target audience is aged 6 to 10, but 6 to 10 year olds get very bored after 2 hours of French monarchistic comedy.

Funny that.