The Panto

Hi everyone,

Can you see Margie and I as actresses? We couldn't either, and now, even after the last 6 weeks of practices and performances it is still a new idea in our consciousness. Nevertheless, we wouldn't have missed our being in this year's "Panto" for the world.

Pantomine is a new art form for those of us from the US - not having this tradition in our background. It is common across the UK and Ireland where Christmas Pantomines feature a standard theme (we did Sleeping Beauty) updated to include local material. The audience participates by screaming back to the performers as appropriate. For instance the bad fairy in ours said, "I'm going to get you out in the car park after the performance" and the audience replies, "No you're not" "Oh yes I am!" etc.

Margie had read about Pantos and we hoped to see one. Then a woman we know turned out to be this year's director and we volunteered to help (selling coffee at intermission perhaps?). Mid November I see Cal (the director) in the chriopractor's office, and as we are chatting she takes a call from a woman dropping out of the chorus. I suggest that I can take one of the two places now left open and that perhaps Margie might also be interested. What we didn't ask was how much time was expected from us as chorus members. This was probably a good thing as it turns out, because we would have had a million reasons we couldn't have done it if we had known ahead of time what we were committing to.

Practices were twice a week (four our parts in the chorus, the main actors were there three nights). On alternate Sundays we also learned our songs for another couple of hours. We were given two lines a piece. For instance, I say to my husband when he brags that he saved the king from the tall thin burgler (next to me in the photo above) "Oh that's right, you stepped on the rake as well as the king." Practice made us familiar with our parts and generally familiar with the play as a whole. Following Christmas the tempo picked up dramatically and in earnest - the pressure on to have the costumes, the set and all of us ready by Jan 1st for a six night run. Tickets were €15 and we were sold out, to an audience of about 250 people, almost every night.

We had no idea how important Panto's are. People love them, look forward to them and connect to their history and all their holdiay memories through them. They are often filled with children, and Mom's remember when they sheparded their young (now grown) back and forth to rehearsals and performances. One man, Finbar, makes the show. This was his 28th year in Pantos, and for the majority of those he has delivered the monologue - loosely a vaudvillian type spoof on the state of life that year - playing on the Cork accent, doctors offices, the police, and current events in our small town. Finbar gets laughs no matter what he says, and there were several times when he saved the performance as another actor or actress forgot their lines. He is more than ready to take the spoof as well. A recently retired bus driver one song tells the audience that now getting to Cork "takes half the time." We learned that during his tenure on the bus, he knew the name of everyone who regularly took his bus and that if the "smallies had spent their money or didn't have enough, sure they rode home anyway." We were told the first night that people buy tickets just to see Finbar's monologue, and now we know that it is true.

As the final night's performance ended we treasured the backstage moments. For instance, the prompters standing behing the curtain giving lines to those in front as they sang a song they had only been given a few days before. Or the cast, behind a drawn curtain, set up for the next scene, singing along with the duet going on out front. The small tricks the younger actors played on us, like putting our cobwebs back on as soon as we pulled them off, blend with memories of small kindnesses such as coffee tea and bisguits at "the interval" (intermission) dished out each night by women who alternately helped with our make up and cleaned up the school after us. Huge crews of people ushered people in, build sets, took care of lights, taught the youngsters the dance of the goblins, made costumes, and put on make up - swelling the 30 of us on stage to a much larger group.

The Panto is a community event - one that embodies the light hearted "laugh at ourselves" lifestyle of the Irish. It expanded our friendship base to include many people much younger than we are, and introduced us to people who know us as people who are intent to be part of the fabric of this community. We hope to continue to support the Rampart Players, and occasionally help out - being part of the chorus, the stage crew, and certainly the audience.