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Uniquely English Entertainment ‘Sinbad the Sailor’

Peter Schirmer

@Dominique Martinez-Lopez

Throughout the festive season, in English-speaking countries across the world, Sinbad will scrub the deck of a magically-shrouded ship and yearn for the heart of the beautiful Shireen as audiences share the re-telling of one of Sheherezade’s tales from the ‘Thousand and One Nights’.

As Gibraltar adjusts to the new year with all its Brexit uncertainties, among these many Sinbads, one will be ‘scrubbing’ the stage of Ince’s Hall – for decades the traditional home of the Trafalgar Theatre Group’s annual pantomime…and a legacy of centuries of military and naval presence on the Rock when officers performed at Christmastime to entertain their families and those of the ‘other ranks’.

@Dominique Martinez-Lopez

In Britain the panto season is already under way; here in today’s more family-oriented Yuletide celebrations on the Rock, Sinbad will not start to scrub until the 24th of January.

Although the modern pantomime takes its initial form from Medieval mummers plays and the harlequinade of Italian commedia del arte, it is a quintessentially English entertainment, combining a quirky mix of song, dance, topical jokes – with a lacing of double entendre – slapstick comedy, and trans-gender players, based on a fairy tale or nursery story.

@Dominique Martinez-Lopez
@Dominique Martinez-Lopez

And it has developed as a form of theatre in which the audience is encouraged to participate – to sing along with certain parts of the music, to boo and hiss the villains, and shout out certain stock phrases to the performers.

For many children across the English-speaking world it is a Christmas ‘treat’ and anyone who has attended the local panto productions at Ince’s Hall will attest to the enthusiasm as they boo the villains of the piece and stamp feet so enthusiastically that it seems the rafters echo to the sound.

Although, like other forms of theatre, its true roots draw from classical Greece and Rome, over the past 250 years, the pantomime has evolved to become as much part of Britain’s Christmas traditions as Santa, the Oxford Streetlights, decorated fir trees and mince pies. And it’s a tradition that accompanied Britain’s colonial expansion. There are records of pantos being performed in the original Australian penal colony at Botany Bay, and during the Boer War Cecil Rhodes attended a staging of ‘Cinderella’ in the old DelMonico Theatre in CapeTown.

Like their forebears, the mummers’ plays and harlequinades, the earliest English pantos contained no dialogue – everything was represented through mime and dance.

At the core of every production is the pantomime ‘dame’ a role with roots in the earliest origins of the theatre, when girls and young women were played by youths, and old women by men – often comically. Perhaps the most famous of these ‘dames’ is Widow Twankey who made her/his first appearance in a London production of Aladin in 1868 – a comic resurrection of Mrs. Noah in the Medieval miracle plays.

@Dominique Martinez-Lopez
@Dominique Martinez-Lopez

Even when – in the 17th century after the Restoration of the monarchy – actresses entered the theatre, most were reluctant to play older parts, and the convention continued. During the Regency the roles of witches, characters like ‘Mother Skipton’ and old harridans often were played by men. And this trans-gender tradition also leads to the role of the hero (or ‘principal boy’) being played by an attractive young woman.

CUE to audience:

Wolf whistles…and probably the only time that these would not be dubbed ‘offensively sexist’.

What do you think?