Swords And Sorcery
PS
Just as in my Proscenium Programme days we had to steal illustrations from library books, so in my panto years I had happily plundered the great songbooks of both sides of the Atlantic for tunes I could fit words to. I did this safe in the conviction that no grasping lawyer was every likely to get to hear of it since our audiences were always so minuscule, it would have been miraculously unlucky should one of them turn out to be some hot-shot litigant. And so it proved, we always got away with it. Should any of these shows of mine ever be revived now, new music would need to be written, but I think it’s safe to say that at this remove, that contingency is vanishingly unlikely.
The opening number here, for instance, what does that remind you of? In an earlier show, ripping off the character of Alice in Wonderland, I had made great play of the fact that ‘Wonderland’ happened to have the same rhythm and metre as ‘Camelot’. Once I’d come up with Chantecler as the name of my setting here (itself a steal from Chaucer), I realised there was no reason to dump a winning tune, so I retooled that rumpty-tumpty title track once again. My only claim to originality is the opening four-fold rising crescendo reiterating the place’s name. The rest is care of the rapturously inventive and blissfully unaware and therefore uncompensated Frederick Loewe. (Put it this way, if I didn’t rate him I wouldn’t use him, would I? Call it an homage, m’lud.)
I’d forgotten so much of this, but hardly surprising as it was nearly forty years ago that we put it on. I’m glad so many of the jokes still seem to work, though thinking about it now, some of the more vulgar ones come closer to the knuckle than I would be comfortable with today: Colombine, for instance, makes one too many references to “positions”. I wanted to make things fun for the adults as well, of course – after all, they paid for the tickets – but I’d forgotten they might have to explain things to their kids on the way home.
Happy, though, to see some of my favourite tropes enjoying their usual airing. It’s surprisingly effective watching a group of people all react in exactly the same way at the same time, ‘stepping back in amazement’ or ‘gasping in horror’. This only came out one night during rehearsals for an earlier show, and I liked the visual so much that thereafter I was always on the lookout for such moments. This time around its Rupert’s surprise appearance towards the end:
SAGRAMORE: And who are you, stranger? I charge you expose yourself.
(All the WOMEN shriek with horror and cover their mouths…)
(Note they cover their mouths, not their eyes…)
And I still enjoy the wholesale trashing of the expected conventions – panto is so self-conscious a form anyway that you simply have to go over the top. Wilhelmina’s “Who on earth are you? I’m certain I’ve never seen either of you before in my life and I would be greatly astonished if one of you was to turn out to be in any way related to me”, for instance, and the mass formal exit and immediate re-entry of the Court towards the end of Act One both got big laughs. That was always a good sign – it showed that the audience, however small they might be (and they were always small), were happy to be on the same page. Once you can make them laugh at the big stuff, they are more kindly disposed to enjoy the subtler things too. And my jaundiced view of royalty is as usual well to the fore in Lucy’s “Oh sire, it’s such a relief to know I’m no more morally corrupt than the royal family.”
Talking of subtle, there’s rather a lot more spunk flying about than I was aware of at the time, and Colombine’s mangling of “bright lights and flesh pots” into “fleshlights and bright spots” would today probably be unforgiveable – if you can believe that in the mid-80s when this was written the fleshlight, a popular sex aid in the form of an artificial vagina, had yet to be invented.
The bit where “a couple of kids from each side of the auditorium” are invited on stage to help with the audience participation was wishful thinking. In the event I think the actors just harangued the echoing stalls for a few moments then carried on bleakly with the show. At least we saved ourselves a few pennies on sweets…
Tony S, Ann A, Walter B, Jane P, Jim G, Katherine S, RAS, Liz V, Ann R, John H, Rebecca B, Paul H