Behind You!!! Catherine Johnson

Imagine the scene, a small room above a pub, a circle of chairs, a sorry looking group of people, one wearing far too much glitter, another dressed as the back end of a horse. The sign on the door reads Panto lovers Anonymous.

And one of those people, perhaps debating whether it's right to do away with the romantic duet that everyone snores through in the second act and wearing what passes for regular clothes dear readers, is me.

I know, for certain that half, maybe even more than three quarters will have stopped reading, blipped across to look at pictures of kittens on robot vacuum cleaners or dogs dressed as Buzz Lightyear.

Well I'm sorry. Panto is a terrible English tradition involving cross dressing, bad jokes and worse songs, but nevertheless one that I cannot help being proud of.  I must admit to cringing at the big budget, past it TV soap star vehicles or innuendo larded ones but can I assure you the Pantomine at Stratford East is different. It's terrifically right on, we've had same sex marriage and evil property developers.

There are many things I hate about Christmas, trees being up far too early. Horrible schmaltzy tunes in what passes for Hastings very own shopping centre. Having to think about what to buy for people unless it's clearly obvious because I just left it far too late and I have failed to hand make things for everyone yet again...

And there are also many things I love, Brass bands playing carols. Children singing carols. mulled wine, mince pies. Watching rubbish telly. But most of all I love our friends and family outing to the Pantomime at the Theatre Royal in Stratford, East London.

The wonderful auditorium at Stratford

Pantomime is dafter than any roomba riding kitten. And what's more it's that whole magic of live theatre thing, it's the interaction, the on the spot come backs of the cast to the front row, it's live music and it's my families one and only unmissable Christmas tradition.

We've been going, my friend and me since our daughters first made friends in Year 3 at primary school. There were a couple of years when the theatre was closed for renovation that we went to the Hackney Empire (too big and glossy) and Hoxton Hall (too small and too unprofessional).

We will sit in the same place - front upper circle - vertiginously staring down into the chocolate box Victorian auditorium that is the Theatre Royal. Shouting 'He's behind you!!" Louder than anyone else, hissing and booing when the baddies and their henchmen (and women) do badness. And of course singing the words on the song sheet that plops down over the stage in the third act.

And afterwards, all of us and some of the kids' (who aren't kids any more) mates eat the traditional pizza and discuss the relative merits of different perfomances, songs, costumes,and  rubbish romantic interludes. (Best ever 2013 Dick Whittington by the way written by Trish Cooke and Robert Hyman featuring a baddie Alien Cheese Queen).

We might look ridiculous. After all our children are now in their mid and late twenties. But we do make an awful lot of noise and have an awful lot of fun.

It's Robin Hood this year......

Season's Greetings!

Catherine Johnson's latest novel is The Curious Tale of The Lady Caraboo, published by Corgi.

Dancing Homer by Caroline Lawrence

Zeus's box of trinkets and props

Last week I saw two dramatic stagings of Homer's Iliad. The first was Simon Armitage’s The Last Days of Troy at the Globe. It was interesting, but never gripped me. I felt that sense of detachment I usually get at the theatre, that I am just watching actors play a role. I also found the production far too ‘British’ for my taste, with the red-haired model Lily Cole as Helen and one of my old Cambridge professors as Zeus. OK, it wasn’t really one of my old professors, but Richard Bremmer might well have been. He portrayed the king of the gods as a rake thin, absent-minded intellectual in linen trousers and sunhat with a box of trinkets for sale. 

The second interpretation took place a few days later in the basement of the cruciform building at UCL (which required the help of Ariadne and her ball of thread to find.) On one of the hottest days of the year, about forty people filed into a lecture hall usually devoted to medical lectures in order to watch a reading and dance called 'Dancing Winged Words'. 

Then a slightly sweaty Greek professor began to read passages from Richard Lattimore's translation of the Iliad while an androgynous woman in her mid-thirties danced it out. 

The effect was electric, like a punch in the stomach or a hand around the throat. Not usually one for tears, my eyes welled up again and again. There was something incredibly powerful and primal about the combination of Homer’s poetry and a single dancer inhabiting half a dozen different parts. Deb Pugh moved fluidly between depicting fiery Achilles and dour Hector, between fickle Aphrodite and vengeful Hera. She flickered from god to mortal, man to woman, alive to dead. She wore a tunic the colour of a bloody liver and her wiry limbs and boyish physique made her equally believable as a warrior as goddess. Barefoot and grunting – without props of any kind – she swung a sword, lifted shield, fired arrows, died and lived. Once or twice the reader, professor Antony Makrinos, wandered into the action and allowed her to cling to him or cover his eyes. Sometimes spare but moving piano music played. 

The whole thing was even more artificial than the Globe version but for some reason it worked. Perhaps it was the simplicity of the production, combined with the skill of the reader, performer, musician and director that gave this low-tech interpretation of Homer’s great epic its emotional impact. 

During the performance, part of UCL's one-week Summer School in Homer, it came to me that I was watching something close to Roman pantomime. The only real difference was that the dancer was female not male and not wearing a mask, and that the music was pre-recorded piano rather than the usual small group of wind, string and percussion instruments. 

I have always found it fascinating that of the three most popular types of entertainment in Imperial Rome, one is quite forgotten. 

The most popular entertainment was the chariot race. Not everybody enjoyed beast fights and gladiatorial combats (Seneca for example) but almost everybody loved the racetrack or ‘circus’ Hence the famous phrase of Juvenal ‘bread and circuses’, referring to the food and entertainment that will keep a populace happy.

But the forgotten entertainment is pantomime. Not what we think of as pantomime today (a guy in white face trying to get out of an invisible box), a Roman pantomime troupe usually consisted of one male dancer (the pantomimus), a small chorus and a few instruments consisting of wind, string and percussion. The singer sang the story while the pantomimus danced it out. He wore a mask, often two-sided, so he could show different profiles to the audience, and with a closed mouth as he did not need to speak. The troupe mostly acted out stories from Greek mythology and were therefore slightly more highbrow that mime or comedy. 

I give my readers a glimpse of pantomime in my fourteenth Roman Mystery, The Beggar of Volubilis, where Flavia Gemina and her friends fall in with a small travelling troupe consisting of one dancer, one female singer and two musicians. 

When I was researching pantomime for my book, the source I found most useful was a succinct article by the German scholar Wilfried Stroh in the book Gladiators and Caesars (translated by Anthea Bell). Stroh emphasises how popular Roman pantomime dancers were, often filling Roman and Greek theatres. Their skill, claims Stroh, was probably superior to anything we can imagine in dance today. It is strange, he concludes, that no modern dancer has yet tried breathing new life into the fine artistic genre of Roman pantomime, which integrated as it did music, dance and poetry. 

Last week I caught a glimmer of what Roman pantomime might have been like and I think I understand its great appeal. I hope that Professor Makrinos and his team – and/or others – will go on to explore this forgotten but powerful form of storytelling.

Caroline Lawrence's Roman Mysteries for kids 8+ are all available in Kindle or eBook format. 

THAT MR FRED VOKES AND HIS LEGMANIA

By Essie Fox

Fred Vokes 1846-1888

With it being almost December, we are fast approaching the height of the pantomime season - a tradition almost as popular today as it was in the nineteenth century when true spectaculars were produced. 


One of the enduring thrills for a Victorian theatre audience would be the pantomime dancing acts - the chance for some mild titillation when viewing a shapely female leg where the glance of an ankle in everyday life might well  be considered outrageous. But such 'artistic' stage antics were not limited to the female of the species and, year after year in the Drury Lane theatre, where pantomimes drew in enormous crowds, the star was Fred Vokes and his Legmania.

Fred is on the far right of this picture

Fred was born into a theatrical family, very famous in the 1870’s as a dancing, acting, singing troup that comprised of three sisters, one brother, and various 'adoptees' who joined and then took on the family name. Fred was by no means the most talented, but he did excel in achieving great feats of contortionist dancing and so very impressive were his moves when appearing in Humpty Dumpty that a Daily Telegraph critic wrote that he -


 ‘...dances as few men in this world probably could dance or would wish to dance. The extraordinary contortions of limb in which his dancing abounds – contortions which in Mr Vokes’ hands – or rather legs – are not lacking in grace – are highly suggestive of the impossibility of his suffering at any time from such accidents as dislocations.’  

View Fred in the bottom right of this poster and you might imagine how the journalist from The Telegraph was concerned about dislocated bones.

A review in The Times in 1871 that followed a visit to Tom Thumb; or, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table was particularly enthusiastic and gives a good sense of the ‘mania’ that was then abounding for Fred and his versatile lower limbs -

‘The manner in which first the crown and then the wig of Mr Fred Vokes as King Arthur persisted in tumbling off while that monarch indulged in unusual gyrations excited tumultuous laughter, and if there could be anything funnier than Mr Fred Vokes’ ‘split’ dance it was his step dance, Lancashire clogs, Cornish reels, transatlantic walk-rounds, cellar flaps and breakdowns, college hornpipes and Irish jigs. Nothing in the way of dances came amiss to the airy monarch whose legs and arms seemed to spin round on pivots and who seemed at once to stimulate the actions of the cockchafer and the grasshopper.

He was well assisted by Mr Fawdon Vokes as the court fool who had apparently danced himself out of his mind in his infancy and had lived on tarantula spiders ever since. All the Misses Vokes (Victoria, Jessie and Rosina), fasincated in their attire, ravishing as to their back hair and amazing in their agility, were fully equal to the occasion. When they didn’t dance they sang and danced simultaneously and then all the Vokeses jumped on one anothers backs and careered – so it seemed  - into immeasurable space.’

Goodness, that reporter was impressed! But all good things must come to an end, as did the Vokes' run of success when the Drury Lane theatre changed management and even though Mr Augustus Harris' new pantomime productions were bigger and better than ever before he regarded the Vokes family as being unruly, too demanding and powerful by far. In return they considered his management style to be tyrannical, and so the family business moved on, continuing to perform in theatres elsewhere although several of them, including Fred, died while really still very young.

But, as we all know, the play - or in this case the dancing - must go on. Fred might have mastered the step toe and clog dance but as the century progressed others diversified yet more, as in the case of Miss Elsie whose routine had the added benefit of being performed on a snare drum. The picture below is taken from the Victoria and Albert museum's archives and is dated as being late 19th century. Even so it looks particularly modern, immediate and full of life; somehow more reminiscent of jazz clubs in the 1920's.

Just as popular were the lady 'skirt dancers' whose dances were performed by gracefully manipulating several yards of fabric. And as less expertise was involved in the 'art' it soon became a domestic hobby, performed by female family members in many a private drawing room. There were even instructions printed up the press - such as these from The Daily Graphic in 1892 -

Miss Topsy Sinden was particularly alluring. And when Miss Letty Lind took her dancing act to America in 1888 the audiences were astounded to witness such demure performances - not an inch of bare leg or bosom exposed. 

Miss Topsy Sinden

Miss Letty Lind's Skirt Dance - 'Going...Going...Gone!'

Such slow and quiet acts may have appealed for a little while but an audience loves variety - and an audience loves excitement - and what more sensational form of dance than the one that evolved from the skirt dancing form when Lottie Collins achieved great fame performing her 'Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay', a routine that began traditionally with muted strains of music and the gentle swishing of fabric, until the first chorus had come to an end when Lottie would pause, place one hand on her hip, and then lift her skirts and lace petticoats high, commencing to kick the 'can-can' - a dance that is still performed to this very day, and one of which I feel quite sure Fred Vokes would warmly approve.

Essie Fox's novel, 'The Somnambulist', features scenes in a Victorian music hall - though, regretfully, nothing quite as daring as the performance of Mr Fred Vokes.