One of the most popular, enduring forms of holiday entertainment in the United Kingdom is the pantomime. For a lot of people, Christmas hasn’t well and truly arrived until you’ve piled a group of friends and family into a well-seasoned proscenium theater and giggled through a campy, nonsensical remake of an old nursery rhyme. But once upon a time, pantomime (or “panto,” for short) wasn’t just a choice among many types of Christmas entertainment—it was the pre-eminent one, in the Great Britain and Ireland as well as across the pond in America. Theater historian Walter James MacQueen-Pope, whose name alone weaves a pattern in Harris tweed, recalls being a kid and having the ultimate seasonal threat dangled overhead: behave, or no panto for you.

But it wasn’t regarded simply as children’s entertainment. An 1868 stage version of Humpty Dumpty was a barnstormer in the United States, “grossing $1,406,000 in New York and on its first tour and prompting the creation of multiple sequels that played to mixed-age audiences in rowdy and ritzy theaters across the country,” writes Marah Gubar. And by the World War II-era peak of pantomime theater, nearly three hundred separate pantomimes were performed each season throughout Great Britain.

So, what is pantomime, and how did it become so popular around the holidays?

Pantomime as a genre is more than its simple dictionary definition would suggest. Professor and critic Charles Kaplan argues that it’s not a mime act or “dumb show,” but its own chaotically syncretic theatrical form. Pantomime is

a mixture of nursery rhyme and fairy tale, with such ingredients as commedia dell’arte figures, sentimental ballads, topical and often satirical references, elaborate stage sets, patriotic songs and tableaux, leggy young women playing juvenile leads, and male comics playing old ladies, all in plots that display a surreal disregard of logic.

Contemporary theatrical scholars generally date the origins of pantomime to the early eighteenth century, specifically 1723.  According to John O’Brien, London’s patent houses (theaters licensed for spoken-word performances) “staged competing pantomimes on the Faust legend that became the hits of the 1723–24 season.” The very popular Harlequin Doctor Faustus; or, The Masque of the Deities opened at Drury Lane in November of that year. In December came the opening of the Lincoln’s Inn Fields production of The Necromancer; or, Harlequin Doctor Faustus.

But while eighteenth-century theater started pantomime on its modern popular path, it drew on well-established historical roots ranging from Roman Saturnalia to commedia dell’arte and Shakespeare (who, by the way, loved a good Christmas play).

Early pantomime theater generally combined two parts: first, a play; and second, a buffoonish slapstick drama featuring four stock characters borrowed from commedia dell’arte: Harlequin; his lady love, Columbine; a grumpy antagonist named Pantaloon; and his assistant, the Clown. MacQueen-Pope succinctly explains the conceit, noting that the “British liked the Comœdia del’ Arte very much, and in that nice little acquisitive way for which they have—up to now­—been so famous, they just took it and made it their property. It became British.”

Moving into the nineteenth century, a few things happened to set pantomime on its modern path. For starters, audiences liked the spoken-drama portion of the evening so much that it began to overtake the “Harlequinade” dumb show. Theaters obliged by dropping the latter; and stars such as Joseph Grimaldi and his slapstick ilk gradually moved over to circus entertainment, where clown work fit right in. Moreover, the Theatres Act of 1843 removed longstanding restrictions on performance, including a rule that spoken drama could not be performed without royal permission.

Theater managers jumped on the chance to put up entertainment that could draw revenue from “children of all ages,” to borrow a phrase from P. T. Barnum. Managers leapt at the chance to democratize theater and shed the tawdrier aspects of its reputation, and pantomime was a great way to do so. It took well-worn stories such as Mother Goose, Aladdin, and Puss in Boots—all speaking to fairy tales and archetypes—and mashed them up with puckish commentary, audience participation, and the occasionally salty joke. Children could enjoy the show, and their parents as well, if sometimes on a different level.

This was also an era in which childhood itself was beginning to develop a new cultural identity as a distinct phase of life. Theater unfailingly reflected this. Childhood, like womanhood in the 1800s, was carefully defined by dominant cultural voices as innocent, protective, and free. This wasn’t the truth for everyone, nor was everyone—particularly outside of the white middle-class norm—included or encouraged to aspire to cushy innocence.

Pantomimes and other theatrical productions of the era portrayed kids as innocent babes, yes, but also as quasi-cartoon characters who were impervious to harm or social injustice. Gubar notes that “Pantomime is the paradigmatic case of a theatrical genre that both was and wasn’t children’s theater, and that simultaneously exploited and ignored the association of childhood with innocence and vulnerability.” Nonetheless the popular image of idealized childhood was a shorthand for innocence, joy, suspension of disbelief, and shuffling responsibility aside. Adults, via pantomime theater with its madcap themes and nursery archetypes, could receive permission to enter these states as well.

Gender play was another distinctive and important aspect of pantomime drama. The young male hero or “principal boy” role was typically played by women like the drag performer Vesta Tilley. The lead female roles, in turn, were typically played by men (“It is hard,” writes Edwin M. Eigner, “to keep a good man down; harder still to keep a British actor out of drag.”). The “Dame,” in the form of characters like Mother Goose or the Widow Twankey, combined many of the old commedia types characters into one bombastic, silly, occasionally horny old lady, with no effort made to disguise masculinity or turn down the camp. (Please do not miss Ian McKellen as Widow Twankey.)

Theater managers in the nineteenth century saw how much pantomime had taken over the entertainment world. Out of fear that it would cannibalize audience desire to see any other sort of show, or play out panto’s appeal too quickly, “pantomime began to be staged only during the Christmas period. It quickly became a Christmas tradition, one that endures and flourishes to this day,” writes Laura Marriott in History Ireland.

McKellen, in the end, has perhaps one of the best descriptions of pantomime’s enduring warm appeal, even if it is not what it was a hundred years ago. Writing in The Times, he noted that panto

is the perfect way to embrace a big emotional story among the farce and the slapstick. Apart from anything else, it gives audiences a chance to shout disapproval and become part of the action. When, in Shakespeare, Kings Lear or Leontes behave foolishly or wilfully, we have to sit there and bear it. In panto, you’re expected to join in and to laugh because we all know it will turn out all right in the end (which is not always true, of course, for Shakespeare’s kings or our own lives).

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