2 weeks ago
43
When I was a child, I did not go to pantos. I was born in Harare, Zimbabwe, where I lived until I was 12. It was years later, when my sister’s boy Nicholas was about five, that I first discovered it – and it was through his eyes. We saw one at Stratford East and he was blown away by how cool everything was, how colourful. His mates were in the audience and that felt great, too. It became a tradition we tried to keep until, of course, he became too cool for school. Panto audiences are different, they have this “response-ability”, which I think is interesting when you go as a big family. You are encouraged to disrupt the action that’s happening and you try your best as a kid to help the goodie do the right thing.
Vikki Stone’s Aladdin at the Lyric Hammersmith in London in 2021 truly changed my perspective on what panto could do. It was just after lockdown and she took the piss out of anything she could: the out-of-our-heads silliness of those times, those maddening press briefings – there was also a Boris Johnson lookalike and there are few things more panto than him. It didn’t exclude anybody and it came with the soothing joy of having a proper, bonkers laugh with a bit of music and dance. It was captivating.
Although I have been known to make work that engages directly with the audience, I was floored by how they achieved that feeling, that special giddiness.
The actors have to be in the moment – they are playing a character, but they’re also reading the audience and reacting to them. I think that is a really hard thing to get right. I also think they are particularly African things, because in southern Africa, we sing, dance and act almost simultaneously. Movement is always a part of your expression and so is music. In Britain, I think panto is the only time that I’ve seen that synthesis.
I am a queer person from Zimbabwe and I’ve written plays about Robert Mugabe and the trauma of migration. I don’t have a problem with being a writer who addresses those things, but Aladdin changed the trajectory of my work. It took me out of the “making Black/African work” box, allowed me to lean into my own silliness, and at the same time celebrate my tendency towards exactness. You need that for a good panto.
And can you believe it? Here we are now, embracing an utterly African central dame in Mama Goose, which I co-wrote with Vikki. And Nicholas, now a talented DJ, has his ticket. I hope to make him proud.
Mama Goose is at Theatre Royal Stratford East, London, until 3 January
