[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
less of a starring role than the Goose, even if his rat-catching activities
are central to the action and it is a difficult to imagine Dick without his
cat as Morecambe without Wise.
Note that this cat is male almost to a fault, unquestionably a tom-cat,
and personated by a man; some things are sacrosanct, even in Pantoland. A
tom-cat is maleness personified, whereas. . .
3 Daisy the Cow is so female it takes two whole men to represent her,
one on his own couldn't hack it. The back legs of the pantomime quadruped are
traditionally a thankless task, but the front end gets the chance to indulge
in all manner of antics, flirting, flattering, fluttering those endless
eyelashes and, sometimes, if the coordination between the two ends is good
enough, Daisy does a tap-dance, which makes her massive udder with its many
dangling teats dip and sway in the most salacious manner, bringing back home
the notion of a basic crudely reproductive female sexuality of which those of
us who don't lactate often do not like to be reminded. (They have lactation,
generation all the time in mind in Pantoland.)
This rude femaleness requires two men to mimic it, as I've said;
therefore you could call Daisy a Dame, squared.
These three are the principal animal leads in Pantoland, although Mother
Hubbard, a free-floating Dame who might turn up in any text, always comes
accompanied by her dog but, more often than not, Chuckles gets in on the act
here, and real animals don't count. Pantomime horses can crop up anywhere and
mimic rats are not confined to Dick Whittington but inhabit Cinderella's
kitchen, even drive her coach; there are mice and lizards too. Birds. You need
robins to cover up the Babes in the Wood. Emus, you get sometimes. Ducks. You
name it.
When Pantoland was young, and I mean really young, before it got
stage-struck, in the time of the sky wolf, when fertility festivals filled up
those vacant, dark, solstitial days, we used to see no difference between
ourselves and the animals. Bruno the Bear and Felix the Cat walked and talked
amongst us. We lived with, we loved, we married the animals (Beauty and the
Beast). The Goose, the Cat and Daisy the Cow have come to us out of the
paradise that little children remember, when we thought we could talk to the
animals, to remind us how once we knew that the animals were just as human as
we were, and that made us more human too.
THE PRINCIPAL BOY
What an armful! She is the grandest thing in Pantoland.
Look at those arms! Look at those thighs! Like tree trunks, but like
sexy tree trunks. Her hats are huge and plumed with feathers; her gleaming,
exiguous little knicks are made of satin and trimmed with sequins. As Prince
Charming, she is a veritable spectacle of pure glamour although, as Jack, her
costume might start off a touch more pleasant and, as Dick, she needs to look
like a London apprentice for a while before she gets to try on that Lord Mayor
schmutter. For Robin Hood, she'll wear green; as Aladdin, the East is
signified by her turban.
You can tell she is supposed to be a man not by her shape, which is a
conventional hour-glass, but by her body language. She marches with as martial
a stride as it is possible to achieve in stiletto heels and throws out her
Page 250
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
arms in wide, generous, all-encompassing, patriarchal gestures, as if she
owned the earth. Her maleness has an antique charm, even, nowadays, a touch of
wistful Edwardiana about it; no Principal Boy worth her salt would want to
personate a New Man, after all. She's gone to the bother of turning herself
into a Principal Boy to get away from the washing-up, in the first place.
In spite of her spilling physical luxuriance, which ensures that, unlike
the more ambivalent Dame, the Principal Boy is always referred to as a "she",
her voice is a deep, dark brown and, when raised in song, could raise the
dead. Who, who ever heard her, could ever forget a Principal Boy of the Old
School leading the chorus in a rousing military parade and rendition of, say,
"Where are the boys of the Old Brigade?"
Come to that, where are the Principal Boys of the Old Brigade? In these
anorexic times, there is less and less thigh to slap. Girls, nowadays, are
big-bosomed, all right, due to implants, but not deep-chested any more.
Principal Boys used to share a hollow-voiced, bass-baritone bonhomie with
department-store Father Christmases but "Ho! ho! ho!" is heard no more in the
land. In these lean times, your average Principal Boy looks more like a Peter
Pan, and pre-pubescence isn't what you're aiming for at a fertility festival,
although the presence of actual children, in great numbers, laughing at that
which they should not know about, is indispensable as having established the
success of preceding fertility festivals.
The Principal Boy is a male/female cross, like the Dame, but she is
never played for laughs. No. She is played for thrills, for adventure, the
romance. So, after innumerable adventures, she ends up with the Principal Girl
in a number where their voices soar and swoon together as in the
excruciatingly erotic climactic aria of Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di
Poppaea, performed as it is in the present day always by two ladies, one
playing Nero, one Poppaea, due to male castrati being thin on the ground in
spite of the population explosion. And, as Principal Boy and Principal Girl
duet, their four breasts in two décolletages jostle one another for
pre-eminence in the eyes of all observers. This is a thrill indeed but will
not make babies unless they then dash out and borrow the turkey-baster from
the Christmas-dinner kitchen. There is a kind of censorship inherent in the
pantomime.
But the question of gender remains vague because you have to hang on to
the idea that the Principal Boy is all boy and all girl at the same time, a
door that opens both ways, just as the Dame is Mother Eve and Old Adam in one
parcel; they are both doors that open both ways, they are the Janus faces of
the season, they look backwards and forwards, they bury the past, they
procreate the future, and, by rights, these two should belong together for
they are and are not ambivalent and the Principal Girl (q. does not v. in this
work of reference) is nothing more than a pretty prop, even when eponymous as
in Cinderella and Snow White.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]