January 1752, early in the evening at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden: 1,300 people are crowded into the pit, the boxes, and the galleries. Stage and auditorium alike are brightly lit; clothes seem to shimmer in the heat. The audience applauds loudly as Lun, otherwise the theater's manager, John Rich, takes center stage.
January 1898, late in the evening at the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton: Outside, the streets terrorized a mere decade before by Jack the Ripper hide their grime and dilapidation under a sheet of snow. Inside, the pit and single gallery are crammed with four thousand East Enders, all forgetting their miseries as George Liupino raises his broadsword against a stage demon.
December 1987, in the afternoon: The Churchill Theatre in Bomley, Kent, stands in the middle of a modern shopping complex, thronged with folks buying last minute Christmas gifts. Inside, the ten-year-old hall holds its full capacity of 750. The ratio of children to adults is about three to one. The doyen of drag artists, Danny La Rue, comes down to the footlights as a roll of handclaps bounces from stalls to circle.
Three very different theaters in three periods of history so divided by the undertow of time that their audiences would scarcely understand a syllable spoken were they miraculously transported from one building to the others. Yet the shows in all three theaters are defined by one word. What was--and is--on stage is pantomime.
Not Marceau's Whiteface
My dictionary contains two main definitions for pantomime. The first is the classical one: a theatrical entertainment in which words are replaced by gestures and bodily actions. Nowadays we tend to shorten this to mime and think of the whiteface of Marceau or the larvae masks of Lecoq. The other definition is equally precise: a kind of play performed at Christmas time characterized by farce, music, lavish sets, stock roles, and topical jokes.
It's a very British sort of definition, but pantomime has been almost totally British in its development. Nothing that involves living people can survive for more than two hundred years without change, and pantomime is no exception. As Britain has changed, so has its favorite theater genre. Yet the shows attracting audiences up and down the country this winter all have elements of the entertainment's of which Alexander Pope wrote so scathingly and Bernard Shaw, so appreciatively. There has to be something more than just spectacle and mirth in an art form that evokes such extremes of critical opinion.
We know that the pantomime that drew full houses in 1752 was called Harlequin, a Sorcerer. Its first performance was recorded in 1725 and, interestingly enough, there is no mention of who wrote the script. This is a problem still plaguing critics 250 years later. The title serves as a bridge in several ways. It is almost the History of Pantomime in disguise.
Harlequin, under that name, was a comparative newcomer to the British theatrical scene. (It is, of course, proper to say British in a modern context, but for practical purposes, most of the time what is mean is England--and metropolitan England at that.) He arrived on these shores to a chilly
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