She stands before us in a blue gingham frock, towering wig and a “hideous yet age-appropriate leisure shoe”. She is Dorothy Blawna-Gale and she is a pantomime dame. The creation of Johnny McKnight – Scotland’s finest proponent of the form – she is sharp-tongued, lascivious and bumptiously lovable.
Unlike her usual festive appearances at the Tron in Glasgow and the Macrobert in Stirling, she is here, out of season, not just to entertain – which she does in abundance – but to educate. In a show that grew out of a lecture at the University of Glasgow in memory of the late academic Alasdair Cameron, a champion of popular theatre, McKnight and director John Tiffany throw in songs, sweets and copious audience interaction to celebrate panto’s radical potential.
It is very funny, but the real soul of this tremendous show lies in the personal story McKnight tells. From his earliest memory of seeing Johnny Beattie at the Ayr Gaiety, when he realised “You don’t just see panto; panto sees you,” he takes us through his first tentative steps as an actor playing the comic silly billy role, hiding behind the character’s asexual charm, and then, in 2006, his first dame.
But something was wrong: in sticking so rigidly to tradition, the tired assumptions, the dated jokes, he was repressing his true self and muting the anarchic possibilities of the form.
It was time to kill the old. In the coming seasons, he upended the cliches, corrected the gender balance and acknowledged his own sexuality. By 2018, he was fielding two male romantic leads in Mammy Goose and audiences did not just accept it: they demanded more. Along the way, he faced sectarianism, homophobia and serious ethical questions, but sticking to the principles of always punching up, thinking his choices through and representing the marginalised, he reclaimed panto’s subversive spirit and made it, hilariously, his own. Oh yes he did.
-
At the Traverse, Edinburgh, until 24 August.
-
All our Edinburgh festival reviews.
