He’s Behind You!
Patrick Ryan takes a look at the history of the most beloved Dublin pastime, the Christmas panto.
For generations of Dubliners Christmas and the early new year wasn’t complete without a visit to one of the many pantomimes playing around the capital.
Though it’s seen today as a particularly Irish (or British) entertainment, the roots of pantomime, which translates as “all kinds of mime”, lie in Rome and pagan cults devoted to Saturn the god of sowing and seed, rather than the fisher of men Jesus of Nazareth.
Saturnalia began as a one-day Roman festival on December 17th and soon developed into a week-long party involving gift-giving and merrymaking of all kinds, where drunkenness and debauchery were encouraged, and the normal rules were turned on their head. Slaves were given temporary freedom, masters waited on servants, false personas were adopted, and just like in modern panto women and men swapped clothes.
Rather than try to eradicate pagan festivals the early Church of Rome simply adopted and adapted. As poet Louis McNeice put it: “We have taken over the pagan Saturnalia for our annual treat, Letting the belly have its say, Ignoring the spirit while we eat…”
300 years before the unification of Italy under Garibaldi’s Redshirts troupes of actors in equally brightly coloured uniforms, who were part of the “commedia dell’arte” moved from town to town, men and women playing specific characters, acting out plots based on human emotions like love, hate and jealousy, their performances peppered with political jokes, social commentary and slapstick comedy – just like pantomime today.
Harlequin (or Arlechino), Columbine (Arlechino’s lover) and Pantaloon (Columbine’s father and a clown) usurped conventions, ridiculing powers-that-be, hiding behind masks and protected by their popularity among the masses. Politicians smiled but secretly seethed at the troupe’s tropes and though Napoleon introduced very strict censorship of carnivals and the commedia dell’arte in 1797 the characters continued to lampoon their masters. One political etching from 1814 to 1815 depicted Napoleon as Harlequin and his advisor and archchancellor Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès, duke de Parme as the cunning thief Pulcinella.
Today “slapstick” is a synonym for physical comedy but it was originally a pliable player’s prop made from two slats of wood, which made a loud, comical clap, a gimmick soon adopted by Punch and Judy puppet shows. Gags were flexible too, adjusted to appeal to specific audiences.
The commedia characters moved from region to region and jumped genres too, turning up in operas and and ballet including the work of world famous composers like Igor Stravinsky, and today Harelequin has morphed into the female “Harley Quinn”, familiar to Gen Z as a character in Batman and the girlfriend of the Joker.
Our patomimes owe much to the masques of Britain’s Elizabethan and Stuart eras, but the European contribution is also key according to Professor John O’Brien of Virginia University, author of the book Harlequin Britain.
“By the 1670s, visiting Continental commedia dell’arte companies were a regular feature of the London theatre; Charles II ordered medals and gold chains to be presented to members of Tiberio Fiorillo’s company in 1673,” O’Brien explains in a scholarly piece for the Theatre Journal in December 1998.
Richard Burbage, later to become the leading actor in many Shakespeare dramas was already performing in commedia-like plays by 1590 and The Tempest by the great bard is also heavily influenced by that Italian art from. 33 years on an important milestone was reached.
“It was in that year that the London patent houses staged competing pantomimes on the Faust legend that became the hits of the 1723-24 season: Harlequin Doctor Faustus; or, The Masque of the Deities opened at Drury Lane in November 1723, followed in December by the Lincoln’s Inn Fields production of The Necromancer; or, Harlequin Doctor Faustus.”
Commedia players soon made their way to Dublin. One of the most notable was Signora Violante and her company of dancers who transfixed audiences with their performances notes Grainne McArdle in a piece from 2005 in the academic periodical Eighteenth Century Ireland. McArdle says that in December, 1729, the Old Dublin Intelligence reviewer stated Violante “walks on a rope from the stage to the upper gallery, and also flys down the same on her breast without being fastened Thereto.”
Apparently these dancers had refined and developed their routines at the Parisian fairs.
“The troupe clearly found its roots in the many itinerant French companies that had visited London’s fairgrounds and theatres from the turn of the eighteenth century. It came closest to the French troupes that had performed in London after 1718,” McArdle concludes.
Contemporary newspapers report that the Theatre Royal in Dublin’s Smock Alley hosted pantomimes in 1737, and a century on the festive tradition was firmly established on both sides of the Irish Sea.
“What is the intent of the Christmas holydays?” mused the magazine John Bull, on Christmas Day 1837. “The merest child would give the correct answer — to eat plum-pudding, and see the pantomime.”
By then the “harlequinade”, a slapstick routine involving the pursuit of the lovers Harlequin and Columbine by Pantaloon and his silly servant Pedrolino was an important part of the performance. Modern Christmas owes much to the works of Charles Dickens, and Jacqueline Banerjee, Associate Editor of victorianweb.org says that what we think of as traditional panto also originated in that era.
“The Victorians prefaced and gradually eclipsed the harlequinade with far more complicated plots, derived from legend, fairytale and so forth. In the hands of talented script-writers, actors, scenery-designers and producers, pantomimes became spectacular Christmas entertainments with universal appeal.”
Many of these new pantos were based on the work of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm whose collection of original German fairytales was first published in December 1812, and later original stories by Hans Christian Andersen. Early accounts of Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, and Little Red Riding Hood often had dark and disturbing adult undercurrents but once sanitized made for festive family friendly fare.
For Christmas 1850 the Queen’s Royal Theatre (previously known as the Adelphi) on Pearse Street close to TCD was putting on performances to delight Dubliners of all ages.
“The Pantomime…at this favourite little theatre continues to attract crowded audiences every evening. The dramatic entertainments are varied and amusing, and the pantomime display goes off each night with increased smoothness and effect,” read a review in the Freeman’s Journal.
“The costumes and scenery are really most creditable to the good taste of the designers and the entertainments may be said fairly to deserve the support they have received from the public.”
The Gaiety started pantos in 1974, and in a presentation published in the Dublin Historical Record 100 years later the noted actor-playwright and director of theatrical costumiers in our capital, Séamus de Búrca discussed a write-up from Christmas 1882 for the Queen’s production of “Dick Whittington and his Immortal Thomas…the cat.”
A generation later the tale of the London Mayor and the ratchatching feline who earned him a fortune was still making a decent few bob for a rival house in Hawkins Street, which two years later hosted “The Eight Lancashire Lads” featuring a talented youngfellah named Charlie Chaplin.
“The 1904 pantomime at Dublin’s Theatre Royal was Dick Whittington. According to the program, it was written specially for this theatre by William Wade. In the tradition of pantomime, Dick Whittington is played by a female, Carlotta Levey,” notes by Aedín Ní Bhróithe Clements, Irish Studies Librarian at Notre Dame University, which has an extensive Irish theatre programme collection.
“An Irish Times review includes particular praise for Carlotta Levey: ‘Miss Levey has proved herself to be one of the very best Principal Boys we have had in Dublin for very many years, and has made a host of friends for herself…’”
Was such cross-dressing a nod to sexual behaviour, women’s emancipation, or simply a bit of fun? Nobody really knows, but it didn’t seem to matter who wore the panties in panto and today male “Ugly Sisters” keep the pagan tradition seen in the cult of Saturn each December 17th, alive.
The time-honoured tactic of lampooning the powers-that-be was also still in vogue according to Ní Bhróithe Clements, quoting an Irish Times piece from January, 1907.
“A newspaper review tells us that local references ‘largely directed against Dublin Corporation, and many of which provoked a good deal of laughter, are furnished.’”
De Búrca recalls that in the Queen’s 1913 panto a young man named Jack Judge stepped forwards to sing his new song It’s A Long Way To Tipperary and a decade later Jimmy O’Dea, a name synonymous with pantomime in Dublin, was starring as Buttons in Cinderella at that venue.
The Olympia Theatre’s offering in 1928 was Cinderella too, but this time the best jokes were on Cork.
‘“There are two gentlemen at the door,” says Chris Sylvester as Buttons. “How do you know they are gentlemen?” asks Dick Smith, as Baron Touch.
“They have Cork accents,” says Buttons.’
By then the panto was an essential part of many Dubs’ Christmas and New Year. Notre Dame’s collection includes a programme from 1956 featuring standout names such as Maureen Toal, regarded then as our answer to Marilyn Monroe and familiar to every family in ‘80’s Ireland as a nTV star in Glenroe, Gate Theatre co-founder Micheál Mac Liammóir, Milo O’Shea, owner of the most famous eyebrows in showbiz and one of the best-known Irishman in Hollywood in the 1970s, and panto royalty like Danny Cummins and Maureen Potter, the beloved Irish singer and comedienne regarded as the best in the business for decades.
Noel Purcell, another panto stalwart who found fame in Tinseltown appearing opposite stars like Burt Lancaster was like Potter long associated with the Theatre Royal and their 1945 production of Mother Goose played to 258,000 people – at a time the population of Dublin was about 500,000 – cheap tickets making it the most successful production ever staged at the venue, and prompting Purcell to joke:
“Come to The Royal. It’s cheaper than lighting a fire.”
Potter and Purcell were jointly honoured with the Freedom of Dublin in 1984 and today June Rodgers, famous for her witty monologues as a schoolgirl determined to see her nemesis Jacinta O’Brien suffer, is one of our best-known, though not necessarily always best-loved, panto stars.
“I remember once playing the Ugly Sisters with Eileen Reid in which we tore up Cinderella’s invite to the Ball,” Rodgers recalled in 2019.
“A little one came flying down the aisle and said ‘Scarlet, you big fat cow, I hate you!’”
The panto continues stronger than ever despite challenges for our time, attention and money. The announcement by the state broadcaster that it was launching Toy Show The Musical for Christmas 2022 drew much criticism from panto impresario Alan Hughes, whose anger was echoed by others in the business operating on far smaller budgets than that available to RTÉ DG Dee Forbes in D4, but the production tanked leaving the market clear once again.
Though the in-jokes are updated every season and the faces change through the decades the format remains much the same as the late Victorian era, an endearing testament to the power of live theatre and the performances of the commedia dell’arte 500 years ago.
