Vikki Stone’s festive tomfoolery, staged after the Covid lockdowns, captured that strange time and achieved a special giddiness
When I was a child, I did not go to pantos. I was born in Harare, Zimbabwe, where I lived until I was 12. It was years later, when my sister’s boy Nicholas was about five, that I first discovered it – and it was through his eyes. We saw one at Stratford East and he was blown away by how cool everything was, how colourful. His mates were in the audience and that felt great, too. It became a tradition we tried to keep until, of course, he became too cool for school. Panto audiences are different, they have this “response-ability”, which I think is interesting when you go as a big family. You are encouraged to disrupt the action that’s happening and you try your best as a kid to help the goodie do the right thing.
Vikki Stone’s Aladdin at the Lyric Hammersmith in London in 2021 truly changed my perspective on what panto could do. It was just after lockdown and she took the piss out of anything she could: the out-of-our-heads silliness of those times, those maddening press briefings – there was also a Boris Johnson lookalike and there are few things more panto than him. It didn’t exclude anybody and it came with the soothing joy of having a proper, bonkers laugh with a bit of music and dance. It was captivating.
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