Tuesday, November 26, 2024
‘I learned to sword fight in heels’: how Susie McKenna is rewriting the rules of panto
Stage | The Guardian: Few people have their spindle-pricked finger on the panto pulse like the writer-director Susie McKenna, whose festive formula has set the tone of theatre’s Christmas canon for decades. Within panto land, her name frequently attracts the prefix “legend”, and no wonder; a former principal boy (the panto’s young male protagonist role, traditionally given to a woman) who steered two decades of festive outings at the Hackney Empire in east London, in the process rerooting theatre’s once-commercial juggernauts in the local community.
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I don’t know much about pantomime, but in theatre class in high school, the very first thing we learned was pantomiming. It was to get us moving and to help us learn to encourage us to exaggerate our acting. Mostly, it was just to mess around and to see what we could get the audience to understand from just our bodies. We dissected movements, we made fake peanut butter and jellies and wrote silly scripts of our own to act out for the class. I really enjoyed it because it took all the pressure off performing. There were no shaky voices or stress about memorizing lines, it was just a fun free for all. I think that that’s what call people to pantomime, because it is just messing around on stage; it’s acting at its most base level, and I think that when you’re doing something so basic and so innate to acting, the more you can stretch it, and push it to new heights.
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