Wobbling Scenery and a Very Loud Prompt: Inside Our Village Panto's Final Rehearsal
Photo: amateur village pantomime dress rehearsal village hall stage UK warm lighting, via i.pinimg.com
We only got invited because our neighbour Sheila is in charge of wardrobe and needed two more people to clap in roughly the right places. That is how we found ourselves on a damp Tuesday in November, sitting on a plastic chair in the village hall, watching a pantomime attempt to become itself.
It was the final dress rehearsal. Not the opening night. Not even a proper preview. Just the last chance for a group of teachers, retired nurses, one electrician and a teenager who clearly had a maths test the next day to work out whether the beanstalk would stay upright. Spoiler: it mostly did.
An Audience of Relatives and One Confused Labrador
The hall smelled of dust, deep heat and the ghost of a hundred bring-and-buy sales. At the back, a tea urn was making the low, threatening noise that tea urns make. Someone had brought a tin of biscuits and put it on the raffle table with a handwritten sign saying 'for the cast only, please'. It had already been opened.
There were perhaps twenty of us in the audience. Every single person seemed to be related to somebody on stage. A woman in front of us kept saying 'that's my Ryan' every time a boy in a tinsel hat walked on. By the interval, we felt like we knew Ryan personally.
A Labrador called Biscuit had been brought along by mistake and spent most of the first act staring at the back of the pantomime cow with deep suspicion. Fair enough.
The Scenery Has Other Ideas
The set had been built by a team of men who, according to Sheila, 'don't really do plans'. It showed. The cottage wall wobbled every time the Dame slammed the door. The forest backdrop was held up by two broom handles and a lot of hope. During the scene change, a fake tree fell over and nobody picked it up for ten minutes, so the actors simply performed around it as if a small conifer had always been part of the script.
The fairy godmother's entrance involved a smoke machine borrowed from a wedding DJ. It produced one sad puff and then a smell that reminded us of a school disco. She carried on magnificently. That is the thing about amateur theatre: the magic is not in the equipment. The magic is in the fact that nobody stops.
The Prompt Is the Star
We had been told the prompt would be 'discreet'. The prompt was not discreet. The prompt was a retired headteacher called Margaret, sitting in the wings with a script and a torch, and she was louder than the Dame. At one point, the Baron said 'I have a plan' and Margaret said 'no you haven't, you've got a headache, it's page forty-two'. The Baron looked relieved. He had, in fact, forgotten his lines.
The Dame forgot her lines twice. The second time, she simply pointed at a child in the front row and asked if he liked sweets. The child said no. The Dame paused, then said 'well, you're no use to me' and carried on. It got the biggest laugh of the night. Nobody will ever know if it was scripted.
Where the Magic Actually Lives
By nine o'clock, we had watched the same scene four times. The lighting desk had frozen. The musical director had threatened to leave and then remembered she had the keys to the piano. A teenager in a pirate costume was eating crisps behind the curtain. And somehow, slowly, the whole thing began to work.
Not because it was polished. It wasn't. But because everyone on that stage clearly wanted to be there. You could see it in the way the older cast members helped the younger ones with their costumes. In the way the director, a man called Phil who had the look of someone who had not slept since October, said 'right, let's just get through it' and meant it kindly. In the way Sheila stood at the side with a sewing kit, ready to fix anything that ripped, fell off or was accidentally trodden on.
Opening night will probably be better. The beanstalk will stand. Margaret will whisper. The smoke machine might even work. But we were glad we saw this version. The wobbly, half-lit, biscuit-fuelled version, where the prompt was louder than the Dame and half the audience was related to somebody on stage.
That is the bit you don't get on a screen. That is the bit we keep coming back for. Oh yes we do.
