Oh yes it is: the extraordinary history of pantomime

There is nothing quite like pantomime. It is loud, anarchic, and cheerfully absurd. It features men dressed as women, women dressed as men, jokes that haven’t changed in a hundred years, jokes that were written last week, a villain who must always enter from stage left, and an audience who are actively encouraged to shout at the performers. It is simultaneously one of the oldest theatrical traditions in the world and one of the most resolutely contemporary — a form that reinvents itself every single year and somehow remains completely itself in the process.

The history of pantomime is the history of a remarkable journey: from the sunlit piazzas of Renaissance Italy, through the pleasure gardens and patent theatres of Georgian London, through the music halls of the Victorian era, and into the glittering, celebrity-studded Christmas spectacle of today. Understanding where it came from makes the experience of watching it — shouting “it’s behind you!” into a darkened theatre, sharing a joke with a Dame who has been making the same joke for thirty years — feel suddenly rich with history.

The Italian roots: commedia dell’arte

Pantomime’s story begins not in Britain at all but in Italy, in the sixteenth century, with a theatrical tradition that would prove to be one of the most influential in the history of performance. Commedia dell’arte was a 16th-century Italian entertainment which used dance, music, tumbling, acrobatics and featured a cast of mischievous stock characters. These travelling companies performed in markets and piazzas across Italy and eventually across Europe, bringing with them a set of immediately recognisable figures whose relationships and conflicts formed the basis of every show.

The characters were fixed but the performances were not. Performed by travelling companies, commedia relied heavily on improvisation, stock characters, and physical comedy to entertain audiences. The audience knew who everyone was before a word was spoken: Harlequin, the quick-witted, acrobatic servant in his diamond-patterned costume; Columbine, his clever sweetheart; Pantaloon, the foolish old father who tries to keep them apart; the Clown, agent of chaos and comedy. These were not just characters — they were archetypes, figures that embodied recognisable human types with enough exaggeration to be funny and enough truth to be meaningful.

During the 17th century, Harlequin and his companions, including Scaramouche, Pantaloon, Pierrot, Punch and love-interest Columbine were improvising comic stories, singing, dancing and cavorting their way across Europe. When they reached England, something happened that the Italians could not have anticipated: the English took these characters, kept what they needed, discarded what they didn’t, and built something entirely new around them.

The crossing to England: Harlequinades and John Rich

Despite Italian Commedia being performed for Queen Elizabeth in 1602, it wasn’t until Commedia spread from Italy to France that it began to be popular in England. French companies performed what they called ballets-pantomimes in London. These dance-mime performances became popular in London and theatres incorporated them into shows as Afterpieces to their main show to help sell tickets.

The man who transformed these fashionable entertainments into something genuinely English was John Rich — a figure whose contribution to British theatrical culture is arguably as significant as anyone who has ever worked on an English stage. A rough, uneducated man called John Rich played a key role in the emergence of pantomime. Rich was a dancer, acrobat and mime artist and during the 1720s he was managing a theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. What he created was a new kind of entertainment. It combined a storyline from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and a harlequinade.

Rich’s Harlequin was not just a cheeky servant, he became a mischievous magician. The inclusion of magic allowed Rich to showcase his flair for the spectacular; his shows included working windmills and fire-breathing dragons on stage, dazzling audiences. Rich himself performed the role of Harlequin and was celebrated for doing so — he played him for many years and gained the reputation as arguably the best Harlequin ever.

The financial rewards of this new entertainment were extraordinary. In 1732 John Rich, the most notable early Harlequin who danced but never spoke, built Covent Garden Theatre with the profits of his magical pantomimes. The theatre built on the proceeds of pantomime would become one of the great stages of British theatrical history — a fitting monument to the form that created it. Rich had taken a continental fashion and turned it into an industry.

It’s worth noting what these early pantomimes were not. Not intended for children, these early pantomimes were made up of serious and comedic sections, interwoven with little to link them. The family Christmas panto as we know it was still a century away. What Rich had created was a fashionable, spectacular, and wildly popular adult entertainment — a far cry from the bawdy but broadly wholesome shows that fill theatres across Britain every December today.

Grimaldi: the king of clowns

The next great transformation of pantomime came at the hands — and the feet, and the extraordinary physical genius — of Joseph Grimaldi, who dominated the form in the early nineteenth century and whose influence on it can still be felt today.

The clown had always been a minor part of the Harlequinade but in 1800, actor Joseph Grimaldi took the character to new heights. He constantly refined and redefined the role, turning him into a loveable and mischievous rogue. Where Harlequin had been the star of eighteenth-century pantomime, Grimaldi’s Clown displaced him entirely — a figure of such irresistible comic energy, such physical invention, such sheer presence, that audiences came specifically to see him and the story became almost secondary.

Grimaldi invented much of the grammar of clowning that we still recognise: the white face and red patches, the outrageous physical gags, the catchphrases and songs that audiences could sing along to. He was responsible for transitioning the character from “country bumpkin fool” to central figure of the harlequinade. Grimaldi developed jokes, catchphrases and songs that were used for decades after his retirement. He also pioneered the second most important British pantomime tradition: the art of cross-dressing.

The price of Grimaldi’s genius was, in the end, his body. The amazing leaps and pratfalls he performed forced Grimaldi into premature retirement, destitution and an early death. Thousands of people would line the streets as his coffin made its way up to Pentonville Hill. He was the first great popular entertainer of the modern age — a celebrity in the way that we now understand the term, someone whose fame transcended the theatre and became part of the broader culture. His death was a public event because his life had been a public gift.

The Theatres Act of 1843: words join the party

Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, pantomime had operated under a significant constraint. Until 1843, theatre licensing had restricted the use of spoken word in performances. The Theatres Act lifted the restriction, allowing any theatre without a royal patent to produce a play with purely spoken dialogue. Now witty puns, wordplay and audience participation were added to the repertoire of mime, daring chase scenes and spectacular transformations.

This was a hinge moment in pantomime’s history. The form that had been defined by physical comedy, mime, and spectacle suddenly had access to the full resources of language — and it seized them with both hands. The puns, the topical jokes, the audience banter, the participation rituals (“He’s behind you!” “Oh no he isn’t!” “Oh yes he is!”) — all of these are, in theatrical terms, relatively recent additions to a form that had existed for over a century without them. They feel essential; they are, by historical standards, innovations.

Dan Leno and the birth of the Dame

With Grimaldi’s death, pantomime had lost its central figure — and it took decades to find a replacement. Harlequin never fully recovered his pre-eminence. The form drifted, experimenting with Principal Boys (female performers in male roles) and a range of comic characters, without settling on a new star around whom everything else could be arranged.

The solution, when it arrived, was unexpected: a careworn, garrulous, working-class mother, played by a man. Pantomime crystallised around the story of a dysfunctional family and that strange, eccentric figure of the Dame. Dan Leno was the celebrated music-hall performer who created this garrulous, working-class woman.

When Dan Leno performed as the Pantomime Dame in the 1880s he transformed a previously minor role into the main part and shaped pantomime into the Christmas show we know today. Leno’s Dames were unlike anything that had come before. As opposed to being outlandish and unbelievable, Leno’s Dames were mothers facing common problems such as poverty, unemployment, and abandonment. The comedy came not from grotesque exaggeration — though there was plenty of that in the costumes — but from recognition. Audiences saw their own lives in the Dame’s struggles, and laughed because they understood.

The great clown Joseph Grimaldi (1778–1837) had been the star of Regency pantomime and brought the subtle arts of mime and gesture to this popular entertainment. In Grimaldi’s performances the clown was always the main character but after his death these clever skills were lost and soon replaced by the much less finely drawn charms of Principal Boys and Pantomime Dames. Dan Leno filled that vacancy with something equally powerful but entirely different: not physical genius but emotional truth, not acrobatics but character.

Leno’s greatest role — and by many accounts the greatest pantomime performance of the Victorian era — was Mother Goose at Drury Lane, written for him for the 1902–3 Christmas season. The character went through a number of phases — from poor to wealthy, humble to haughty, plain to beautiful and young to a final incarnation as the good old original Mother Goose, complete with top-knot and bunion. Mother Goose was Leno’s favourite pantomime role and was considered to be the greatest triumph of his pantomime career. He died in 1904, aged just 43, having given the pantomime Dame a humanity and depth that the role has never entirely lost.

The Victorian spectacle and the celebrity tradition

The Victorian era transformed pantomime in another important respect: it made it lavish. Under the management of Augustus Harris at Drury Lane from the 1880s, pantomime became a spectacle of a kind that had never been seen before — huge casts, elaborate machinery, spectacular transformation scenes, and production values that made every previous pantomime look modest by comparison.

Augustus Harris started the still popular tradition of casting music hall stars in main roles in Drury Lane pantos. Performances became lavish and casts grew vast in size. The tradition of casting popular music hall, radio, and TV stars in panto was and still is a strategy to put bums on seats. This shift in the late Victorian era enabled panto to cross class boundaries and secure its future in amateur and professional theatres countrywide.

The celebrity panto tradition — which today gives us soap opera stars and reality television contestants in the leading roles — is therefore not a modern corruption of some purer form. It is a Victorian invention, as old as the pantomime traditions it sometimes seems to threaten. The audiences who crowded into Drury Lane to see Dan Leno were motivated by exactly the same impulse as those who fill regional theatres today to see a familiar face from the television: the combination of live performance and recognised celebrity, the sense of seeing someone you already know in an unexpected and intimate context.

The twentieth century and beyond

Pantomime survived the twentieth century’s disruptions — two world wars, the rise of cinema and television, the transformation of the entertainment industry — with its essential character remarkably intact. It proved, time and again, to be the most resilient of theatrical forms: capable of absorbing new influences, new celebrities, and new topical material without losing the core elements that make it what it is.

The fairy tale plots — Cinderella, Aladdin, Jack and the Beanstalk, Dick Whittington, Sleeping Beauty — provided a stable narrative framework that could accommodate almost infinite variation in treatment. The stock characters — Dame, Principal Boy, Principal Girl, Villain, Comic — gave every production its essential dramatis personae. The audience conventions — the call and response, the booing of the villain, the participation rituals — created a collective experience unlike anything else in theatre.

And the topicality remained constant. Pantomime remains endlessly popular and beloved by audiences because it strives to remain current. The latest pantomimes, like those before them, are peppered with culture-driven jokes and political satire relevant to the current day. Pantomime evolves with society and this is what makes it so fun and so popular.

Why pantomime matters

For many people in Britain — and for the British diaspora around the world who have carried the tradition with them — pantomime is the first experience of live theatre. It is the show their parents took them to, the memory that established the possibility of theatre as a source of joy, excitement, and communal feeling. The child who first shouts “it’s behind you!” in a darkened theatre and hears two hundred other children doing the same thing is having an experience of collective participation — of the audience as an active element in the performance — that will shape their understanding of theatre for the rest of their life.

This is not a trivial function. Theatre depends on audiences who understand, on some level, how it works — who have learned to participate, to respond, to be part of the event rather than mere spectators of it. Pantomime teaches this lesson with such irresistible energy that it barely feels like teaching at all. It is simply, magnificently, fun.

The Harlequin who dazzled London audiences in the 1720s, the Clown who made a generation weep with laughter, the Dame who made them recognise themselves — all of them are still there, in some form, in every pantomime that plays this Christmas. The form changes; the magic doesn’t.

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