At the heart of the story is the relationship between Zoe and Yazmin. Their gender identity isn't performed to the audience for laughs, but with heart and empathy. Rather than having the Principal Boy as a sexualised woman who just happens to be in boy's clothing, the play's hero is the non-binary Zoe. One of The Boomkak Panto's subversive innovations is its treatment of gender. But it also relies on sexist reproductions of gender, presenting women's bodies as either highly sexualised or grotesque. The reversals of gender in pantomime highlight and parody rituals of masculinity and femininity, and the extent to which gendered identity is performed. There is also the Panto Dame, a middle-aged man in campy drag, playing a matronly woman always on the hunt for a new husband. (This type of casting is known as a breeches role, which emerged in the 1660s with the introduction of the English actress, but it was mostly an excuse to show women's legs in tights.) Traditionally, the panto's protagonist is the prince, known as the Principal Boy – although the audience is perfectly aware this strapping lad is actually a woman in men's clothing. There has always been something subversive about panto, particularly when it comes to its carnivalesque play with gender. Yazmin is the daughter of an Iranian refugee who feels the pressure of living up to her mother's high expectations. Zoe is a young queer person who has found their identity. The true heart of the show is the love story between Zoe (Zoe Terakes) and Yazmin (Mary Soudi). How, then, do you refresh pantomime for a modern Australian audience? You make it a queer love story set in the Outback, of course. Read more: A brief history of the pantomime – and why it's about so much more than 'blokes in dresses' While the genre is still popular throughout Britain, you would be hard pressed to find a panto in Australia today. Especially when the villain is somehow trounced, the lovers marry and order is magically restored at the happy ending.Īlthough pantomime is now a distinctly British art form, it has its origins in the Italian commedia dell'arte, a masked, clowning style of acting, which was nativized in England as the Regency harlequinade.ĭuring the Victorian period – the heyday of panto – the entertainment was transformed into an extravagant spectacular. Pantomime, as the anti-panto Alison (Virginia Gay, who also wrote and co-directed the production) tell us, is void of structure, tone, logic, emotion and time, where“things seem to happen without cause or effect”. There's song and dance, slapstick, enormous casts and puns galore. There's song and dance, slapstick, extravagant sets and outrageous costumes, enormous casts, audience participation, clowning, cross-dressing, puns galore, satirical topical references – and no pretence to realism. They are comedic retellings of fairy tales and nursery rhymes, from Mother Goose to Cinderella. In classic meta-theatrical tradition à la The Muppets, the townspeople plan to put on a panto to raise money and save their town.įor the uninitiated, pantomime – or panto, as it is more affectionately called – is a type of British theatrical entertainment mainly for children played around Christmas. The Boomkak Panto centres on the inhabitants of the fictional“Little Aussie Town™” of Boomkak, who are fighting to save their home from the evil Big Developer's scheme of building a freeway, high-density housing or a casino.
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What value, then, can there be to a pantomime? As Virginia Gay and Richard Carroll's exuberant The Boomkak Panto shows, pantomime as a genre may be utterly bonkers and fundamentally nonsensical, but it offers audiences the possibility of irreverence, joy and, most importantly, community.
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He wrote in 1897 that this dramatic genre is“a glittering, noisy void”, which worries“the physical senses without any recreative appeal to the emotions and through them to the intellect”.
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The great Victorian playwright George Bernard Shaw was not an admirer of pantomimes. ( MENAFN- The Conversation) Review: The Boomkak Panto, directed by Richard Carroll and Virginia Gay, Belvoir