Content area
Full Text
BRITISH PANTOMIME PERFORMANCE. By Millie Taylor. Bristol: Intellect Books, distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2007; pp. 208. $40.00 paper.
Pantomime, the single greatest creation of British popular theatre, is a form about which those outside Britain continue to be almost totally ignorant. Whenever I talk to Americans about it, even to academic colleagues in theatre departments who are learned in thousands of years of performance across the world, I have to begin by explaining that it is not silent mime and has nothing to do with Marcel Marceau. In contrast to other forms of popular theatre, from melodrama to Broadway musicals, which have drawn the attention of theatre scholars, panto (as it is affectionately known) has lacked anything much by way of academic study. There are a few articles, but most book-length studies are commercial, not scholarly-little more than nostalgic collections of photos and chatter. There are some reference works, like David Pickering's Encyclopedia of Pantomime (1993) and David Mayer's Annotated Bibliography of Pantomime (1975), but Millie Taylor's British Pantomime Performance is probably the first academic monograph on contemporary, as opposed to eighteenth century, panto to appear.
For many millions of British people, the annual family visit to the Christmas pantomime, be it Aladdin or Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or Dick Whittington, is their only trip to live theatre each year. They seek,...