Drag Queen Dames: Good, Bad or Non-Binary?

A bit of a thorny-mind-twister this week. I've followed a train of thought that started off with the question : "should drag queens play dame?" took a detour through websites of acting agencies and nearly derailed itself on the philosophical musings of 18th Century Germans.  

Still, preferable to the transpennine express. 

ToOt ToOt! All aboard!

Non-Binary Performers and the agents that represent them... 

What an AI thinks a gender non-binary casting website would look like.
by Anne AI  

This week we’ve been dealing with an agency (not pictured above) which divides its performers according to gender. Nothing unusual in that of course. A lot of agencies list their clients as male and female: it makes their list easier to search. 

 However...

... this particularly agency divides its performers as follows:

1. Male 

or

2. Female and non-binary 

Which is an unusual -

    -    and thought provoking  -

           - choice.

🙏 Huge apols to all the sticky-beaks out there, I’m not going to name the agency here. Not because I think they’re doing anything wrong, or have anything to hide, but merely because I’m going to delve into some controversial topics and anyway… the ideas are the important things, not the individuals. 

Let's go back and read that categorisation again:

1. Male, 

or

2. Female and non-binary

...

...

...

...

elipsis

I don't know about you, but to me at least it’s a grouping that immediately stands-out. 

       ? Why are the non-binary performers grouped with the female performers? 

              ?  What is it about the "Female and non-binary" performers that makes a cohesive group? 

? Does that mean all these performers are biologically female? 

                               ? Does any of this matter?

                            ? What's going on with the crazy formatting of this paragraph ?

"❓"

 

Question mark indeed!  I don’t know about you, but if I was biologically female and told my agent: “My subjective experience of gender means that I don’t identify as a female, despite my biological sex,” I’d be a bit teed off if they then lumped me in with the females anyway. 

🚩 I MUST FLAG at this point, that I am not non-binary. I feel very binary. I feel very male. In fact, I feel so binary that I struggle to imagine what it means to say “I feel non-binary.” That being said, I’ve met countless people who struggle to imagine what I mean when I say “I feel gay,” (in fact, truth be told, I’ve felt several!) so I am definitely not about to gainsay somebody else’s lived experience based on my lack of imagination. 🚩

However, as peeving as I imagine it would be to be non-binary and lumped in with the females because of my biological sex, I cannot imagine a world in which a performer who was biologically male comes out to their agent as non-binary only for their agent to relist their profile alongside all the women. Of course I could if they were trans… but non-binary? 

My best guess is, the agent has grouped their clients together by casting. If a producer is looking for a woman, they’re looking for someone who can be read as a woman by an audience. 

A Producer's Perspective

From the producer’s POV, does it really matter whether that person feels like a woman, or feels non-binary? After all, the audience won’t know… unless you put it in the programme. (Should we be mentioning it in the programme?  Is that something that people care about now?)

The same logic presumably belies Spotlight’s decision to list “ethnic appearance” rather than “ethnicity.” I mean… if you look like you could be Greek, why not put yourself forward for the part of “Young Greek Man”? 

Ancient Greek Drag Queens were often children.
NO JOKE:  click here for article

The cynics amongst you may well note that “it’s all very well picking Greek as an example… you couldn't very well make the same argument for a dark-skin-tone white actor claiming to be black or mixed race.”

OH, COULDN'T I?!

No, I couldn't. You’re right. A better arguer than me would try to point out that the performative portrayal of Greek nationals isn’t contextualised by the same historical racism as black-face or yellow-face, but honestly, I think if the Equity Balkan committee came out up-in-arms, the industry would quickly capitulate. 

Nevertheless, in a world where the difference between your Aladdin being cancelled or sold-out is whether your publicity shots feature someone perceptibly Chinese or not, producers may find some considerable value in “appearances” rather than “identities.” I can bet you a yuan to a dollar that there have been more than a few marginal casting decisions that came down to which white actor looked most like they could be part Asian. After all, nobody wants to shout “racist” at someone only to find out it’s actually you that assumed someone’s race! 

Artwork for Aladdin 2022.
Can you tell whether the actor on the left actually is Chinese
or merely has a naturally Chinesey face?

But what about all those parts where producers are looking specifically for a non-binary actor? There are an increasing number of them. So much so, that Spotlight issues the following exemplar phrasing to anyone staging an all trans/non-binary cast: 

 ‘We are looking for a cast of actors who present as trans/non-binary. We want to create a piece that is ‘gender euphoric’ and actively utilises the knowledge and lived experience of trans people within the work. If you are comfortable to bring your life experience to the production, whatever trans identity you have, then we’d love to hear from you.’ 

Well, in that case, you’ll hardly be wanting to trawl through an agency website to try and locate their non-binary needle in a haystack of female performers. 

 So...

What’s the alternative? 

You could always plump for:

1. Male 

2. Female 

3. Non-Binary 

                                                                            But IMHO that feels intellectually clunky...

Non-Binary identities reject the received Male/Female sword of Damacles that hangs over the head of society. Surely NB should sit outside the binary, not alongside it!  By which logic, I suggest: 

1. Binary 

2. Non-Binary 

- with the first option forwarding you to a secondary page listing all the non-NB performers as Male/Female accordingly. 

💻If you’re worried your NB performers may miss out on any other opportunities, you could add in a codicil to the male and female pages along the lines of: “We also represent non-binary performers. 

💻You may like to consider one of our following clients…” and hyperlink to their spotlight pins. 

💻If you really wanted, you could post something reciprocal highlighting all of your male and female clients at the bottom of your Non-Binary page, but that may be over-egging the pudding. 

💻Or whatever the non-binary equivalent phrase is… 

...over-gameting? 

💁 

Whilst this is conceptually neater, I’m sure that the practically-minded amongst you are already thinking: “what, so now I’m having to click twice every time… I can’t be arsed with that!” Which I think may well be the line-of-thinking the agency tried to head off when they lumped their NBs and their Fs in together in the first place. 

GOSH – it’s all got so terribly complicated, hasn’t it? And so quickly! “We didn’t have any such thing as non-binary when we were kids and now all of a sudden, barely 50 years later, things have all changed!” Too true. 

It's tough, all this change, isn't it?  Here's a picture of my new puppy to cheer us all up again.

Name: Toby Cousins-Richards
Gender: Dog

So what has all this got to do with the panto? That is, apart from the possible increase of left-clicking-finger-RSI amongst panto producers? 

Well, quite a lot as it happens. 

Binary Gender and Pantomime

Other than Shakespearian pastoral comedy, Great British pantomime is perhaps THE genre of theatre in which the interrogation of binary gender is most integrally linked to the conventions commonly associated with the artform. 

A gender-bending all-female (and non-binary) cast performance of 
The Taming of the Shrew at The Hope Mill, Manchester
OMG... this was AWESOME!  Congrats to all the humans involved!

BIG WHOOP!  Saying “gender-bending is a defining feature of British pantomime” is hardly going to be a surprise to anyone reading this blog. 

From the thigh-high-leather-boot thigh slapping principal boys (whose numbers appear to be thinning each year) to the big-boobied crin-spinning pantomime dames, every good pantomime has someone pretending to have a variety of genitals of which they are, in actuality, intercrurally bereft. 

🐓🐱🏀🍆👄🍑👀🌂✅🔔🍐🍼🐍

Old Mother Hubbard went to the costume cupboard 

    to get herself something to wear 

Old costume mistress, looked down with interest 

    Look! Wee Willie Winkie's down there!

                                                                      - traditional Lancashire nursery rhyme 

                                                                        thanks to The W.W. Winkie Estate © no rights reserved

As important as F2M gender swapped casting is to the pantomime, allow me, if you would, to restrict my focus in this blogpost exclusively to the role of the Dame. Ta.

💋

Pictured below is the comment thread under my last blog post in which two posters are arguing whether the dame should be played by a drag queen or not.   It was indeed this debate which kicked me off onto this series of fascinating tangents. 

Are you squinting as hard as I am to read this?

⚠ CAUTION: In case my PhD supervisor is reading, I've had to phrase the following thought so precisely, the meaning of it has been rendered practically unintelligible.  

Any successful parsing of a performative act in which a male performer depicts any female character, must necessarily be predicated upon the acknowledgement that binary gender is the ubiquitous, culturally-dominant paradigm through which semiotics are likely to be contextualised in society at large, and by inference the plurality of audience members. 

 

Paradigm  Pah-Rad-I'm (noun.) Defn. A way of looking at the world.   

For example: "In order to sound cleverer than he was, the academic used the word 'paradigm' when he could have just written 'a way of looking at the world.'" 

Now, just in case he doesn't read this, let me say it again, only sloppily and in ambiguous language.

Men playing women on stage is funny because most people understand gender to be male or female. 

BINARY GENDER PARADIGM = THINKING THAT GENDER IS JUST MALE/FEMALE

In a world in which male and female didn't exist, the dame would be simply a human portraying another human… 

... which is fine!

I’m sure a hilarious human would have great success when performing a well-scripted role of this type. 

However, be honest, that’s not what you think of when you think of dame, is it?

The joke is 

it’s a man in a dress. 

At least, lots of the jokes work because it’s a man in a dress; and by corollary, most of the jokes we enjoy would fall flat were it not so to be. 

 e.g. 1 Picking a boyfriend 

This bit is funny if you’re a man in a dress picking a heterosexual man who you then make feel uncomfortable by flirting with him (particularly if it’s in front of his wife). 

 e.g. 2 Funny innuendoes.  

You know, the ones that the grannies all laugh at, that go straight over an 8 year old’s head… “I’ve got something other women haven’t got” and the like. 

These conventions work because we live in a world in which the shared paradigm through which the majority of people conceptualise gender is a male/female binary. 

If a pantomime dame was played by your-dad-in-a-dress then the funniest person to watch the reactions of would definitely be your mum. 

Of course, you could strip out the gags that rely on this binary, and still have a dame that keeps the crowds roaring… as any one of the great (and most notably Scottish) female dames can prove. 

Scottish legend and veteran panto dame, Elaine C Smith,
delighting a school audience with 10 minutes of improvised tableaux vivantes

BUT if you are stuck on the your-dad-in-a-dress archetype, then ignoring the culturally-ubiquitous gender-binary paradigm just to appear woke would mean cutting out so many crowd-pleasing classics, you might as well audition for King and let someone else have the funnies. 

Notice my careful description of dame as your-dad-in-a-dress… not, as the more well trod description has it: dame as a-man-in-a-dress. 

A man-in-a-dress describes all kinds of people: pantomime dames, drag queens, Grayson Perry, catholic priests or anyone out on a stag night north of the M62. 

Boris Johnson as Dame Hard Brexit, battling on through the ghost gag
after a slow puncture left both of his blow-up boobs deflated.
 

However, not all of these men are your-dad-in-a-dress. (NB I can’t actually prove that, but if I know one thing about your dad’s agent, she’d never agree to him doing that number of costume changes!) 

Out of these groups, only drag queens see significant cross-over with the part of the pantomime dame.  A cross-over which (as is evidenced by the FB debate shown above) is NOT UNIVERSALLY supported! 

If you love reading somewhat conceptually garbled articles that try to claim that panto dame is in fact drag, try this one from the Grauniad.

In fairness to the Grain, the similarities between drag and dame are easy to see.   I bet you could easily name a dozen: 

They’re both men in dresses (1), often FABULOUS dresses (2), extraordinary wigs (3) have great big fake boobs (4) and a ton of make-up (5). Both characters are performed on stage (6), both interact with the audience (7), crack jokes (8), innuendos (9) and improvise (10) as well as regurgitating classic one-liners (11). And many of the best ones have a secret hipflask waiting in the wings (12). 

Given the overlap, you may well be wondering: what stops a drag queen from being your-dad-in-a-dress? Answer – your mum! And that answer is not quite as frivolous as it may first appear to be.

I know, I know. STOP BITING MY HEAD OFF!

                         YES: There are straight men who do drag. 

        and some women,

                     and some bisexual men,

                            and also non-binary humans, and… 

Before you list off the rest of the LGBTQA2SNB+ alphabet at me, you have to concede, in the broadest of brushstrokes, that the drag queen is an AOGMO (archetype of gay male origin). 

The conventions of drag queen performance are borne of, and therefore contextualised by a history of gay men performing to queer audiences, in queer run venues, in spite of and in juxtaposition to the pervasive heteronormativite norms of the broader culture at large. 

The performance of drag is a political act that challenges the heteronormative binary of “normal vs queer” – or as the gays amongst us grew up feeling: “them vs us”. 

 The power of the drag queen comes from the shared identity of the LGBT+ community. When we transplant the drag queen into the heteronormative family-centred performative context of pantomime, we alienate the archetype from the power it usually wields. 

The drag queen dame finds herself in the exact same position as the dame that's your-dad-in-a-dress.  Denuded of any external context, both types of performer must now make their hay from the shared male/female binary paradigm of the family audience… the very same heteronormative binary drag once evolved to reject. 

Performing a drag-queen-as-dame demands that the members of the audience reframe the act of the male usurpation of femininity as a mask, no longer in terms of lampoon or bouffon, but as a declarative affirmation of the performer's queer identity.   

OK, society has moved on a lot, but the truth of the matter is most people who have kids to take to a panto are straight. (Trust me, my husband and I have been trying to have kids for years. Still nothing. I’ve had my legs up against the wall and everything!) 

 Can a straight audience enjoy drag? Of course!  But when they do, something fundamentally different is happening than when the same audience watches a dame who is a-dad-in-a-dress. They watch. They spectate. They do not commune. 

Not in the same way the ragtag crew of a gay bar commune with the drag queen on Friday nights. Nor in the same way their granny and grampa communed with the cock-in-a-frock playing Twanky back in the 70s. 

 How could they? 

How can a straight family understand all of the history, community, connotations that come with the drag queen?  

They can laugh.  But they can’t understand. 

You may counterpose: "drag has evolved far beyond its queer meaning."  You may point to Drag Race and mega star celebrity drag queens like Lily Savage. 

And yes – it is true. 

Just as our society has grown to accept and include queer people, queer performance and archetypes have both become much more accepted and represented in the public sphere. And all of this is to be much applauded. 

Thanks for all the laughs, Paul.  We'll always love you x 

The same hard work and bravery of queer activists that gifted acceptance and visibility to the LGBT community also gave straight society drag. When drag queens do panto they’re helping to edify that connection. They’re flying the flag for queer culture and for anyone who feels marginalised or excluded. WHAT MARVELLOUS WORK! Our drag queen dames should be supported and celebrated for all this and more. 

It is utterly commendable. 

But it’s different to what’s going on when you’re watching your-dad-in-a-dress. When a drag queen tells a bloke in the front row “you’re gorgeous,” the line is contextualised within a gay paradigm. When your-dad-in-a-dress says the same line, it’s contextualised within a binary-gender paradigm. 

And if all of that doesn’t scream Hegel to you… you must have slept through your BA epistemology tutorials!  Shame on you!

Equity representative promoting rural, touring and regional pantomimes

If you can bear to stay with me for just four more teensy-tiny, incredibly dense paragraph that reframe the debate using Hegelian Dialectics, then I promise I’ll make it all worth your while.

If you can’t be arsed, you can skip this bit and then just pretend you read it should we later bump into each other at an award ceremony. 

If you're skipping, skip now!

In layman’s terms, and assuredly making a hash of it all, what Hegel argued was: for any idea (or thesis), it can only be understood in the context of it’s own negation (antithesis). True understanding means bringing these two thoughts together to reveal a greater truth (synthesis). Hegel was talking about logical arguments, but the same pattern continues when we think about identities. This is because identities are necessarily defined by juxtaposition to a defined out-group. 

To understand what it means to perform drag, we must understand what it means to be gay. Gay identity can only be understood in the context of a heteronormative societal mores, with the synthsesis of these counterposing identities informing a queer paradigm. Thus, when a dame is performed as a drag queen, the audience’s reading of the character is contextualised within a paradigm of queerness. 

However, when a dame is performed as your-dad-in-a-dress, the audiences are prompted to understand the character through the lens of the performer's maleness in juxtaposition to the femaleness of the character.  It is the synthesis of these counterposing male/female identities that informs our understanding of binary gender.  

NB Non-binary identities iterate this abstraction. To understand what it means to be non-binary, we must first understand what it means for gender to be paradigmatically binary, and then synthesise these counterposing identities to understand gender as a continuum. An interesting thought exercise for the academic is to ponder how this process might further be iterated, and in so doing to second-guess what type of novel identity may well be synthesised by the generation that follows. 

Despite attending 4 weeks of puppy socialisation
Toby still doesn't have even a basic grasp of Hegelian Dialectics

 IF YOU SKIPPED, PICK BACK UP HERE! 

So where do I fall on this debate? 

Well, I like watching drag, because...

I also love watching a man perform dame like my-dad-in-a-dress. I loved my dad... and my mum... with their weird heteronormative marriage, that they both conceptualised through their own little male/female gender binary paradigm. It is a paradigm that we all intuitively understand, even those who may no longer live within in it. 

Would I laugh if my dad put balloons up his jumper, wore lipstick and said in a high, girly voice “ooh, me knickers are right up me bumcheeks!”

❓ 

You bet I would! I’d laugh like a hyena. And so would you. And so would your mum. And so would your agent's mum. And so would your agents female/non-binary client’s mum. 

And there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that it’s funny because, for the majority of our society at large, the gender binary that makes it funny actually exists. 

Even if we reject it ourselves. 

 ;TLDR 

1. Traditional panto requires gender binaries 

2. It is OK to acknowledge that for large swathes of society, the traditional gender binary is the dominant extant paradigm (even if we reject it ourselves) 

3. There are important differences between how a drag queen is read compared to traditional dad-in-a-dress dames.  

4. My preference is to script, cast and direct the dame like my-dad-in-a-dress, and to get my drag fix when I go to the gay bar.  Other preferences are available.

5. Every dame performer, regardless of style, deserves our support and celebration.

Did I mention I've got a new puppy?

Are panto actors too posh?

Not all actors are posh, obvs.  Dame Judi Dench is common as muck, it’s the rest of the ne’erdowells that need to rough up a bit… the hoity toity rum-buggers.

Dame Judi playing Sir Ian MacKellen playing Dame Twankey Trott
St Margaret-le-Basset's adult panto: Witt Dickington Pussy (1976) 
Photo courtesy of Mr Eddie Hall Esq.

 

And don’t read this thinking: “well he can’t mean me… I can only afford Starbucks twice a week.”  I do mean you… well most of you.  About 90% of the arts columnists at the Grauniad are to be believed.  They don’t exactly say how that data is compiled.  Presumably the methodology is somewhat more than “Q1. Do you get out of the bath to have a wee?” followed by two tickboxes: “Yes” and “No - I come from Wolverhampton.”  But however they came to the figures, you can read all about it here.

The truth of this finding prompts several questions:

1. Why is it happening?

2. Why does it matter?

3. What can be done about it?

Why is it happening?

I'm sorry to break it to you all, but acting is not a money-making career path.  

Unknown Musical Theatre Graduate aged 23

OK, if you line up all the actors in the world, there is the odd multi-millionaire... but they're exactly that - odd.  

Most jobbing actors are just struggling to get by.  Saying you are 'an actor' is as close as dammit to saying you are a barman/barista/kids-party-princess who goes to auditions twice a week.

When I graduated from RADA, the statement: I am an actor, was always met with the question: "What is your muggle job?"  NB a lot of the new grads coming out of training just call it their "non-acting job" out of a general sense of embargoing JK Rowling... time marches on.

For many actors, the hard graft and sparse castings eventually drum them out of the industry into better paid jobs that don't demand you be available to travel into central London with 12 hours notice.  

"I'm late... I'm late..." said the Rabbit.
"Late for what?" asked Alice.
"For my third callback for Villager 3!"

Neil Griffiths from Arts Emergency hits the nail on the head: “Creativity and culture are not like other industries. The power of networks and connections is multiplied. And you can’t talk about diversity if you’re not making the workers secure. Testimony from the frontline is people drop out, they find it hard to progress.” Translation: It's who you know, not what you know. And if you're not in the right social circles, good luck getting a foot in the door.

In terms of workforce demographics this means that the older you are, the less competition you face. Princes are ten a penny, but Aldermen are hard to find.

In this Uber-competitive workplace, telling your kid "go and be an actor" is often just middle-class-speak for "take five years out to try something you love, and if you don't get any big parts, mummy and daddy will bail you out."  For poorer families, this can seem like a luxury they can ill-afford.

In this way, the dilemma facing working class families mirrors that facing many first generation immigrant families.  It's no wonder that families from immigrant communities don't send their kids to drama training at the same rate as indigenous white families.  If you're going to uproot your life and move to a new country, are you really going to tell your kids to gamble on a precarious career path?  More likely you'll be chivvying them along to medical school or a BEng at the best redbrick their grades will allow.

All other things being equal, a glut of middle class actors dominating the industry is a natural consequence of the glut of middle class kids entering into training.  Ipso facto.  Veni, vedi, vici.  Chum ba wumba. 

Caesar: Emperor, Salad, Dog Food. 

Why does it matter?

The ethical pragmatist in me wants to say it doesn't matter.  We're all in charge of our own lives... if you want to be an actor, it's up to you, and if you don't want to be an actor, you don't have to be.

OK, so Britian's got a lot of middle class actors.  So what?  We've also got a lot of gay hairdressers but nobody's busting a gut trying to get straight men into beauty schools.

"Ah, BUT..." you might say. "Working class people need to be represented on stage.  Particularly in pantomime - it's a working class art form."

It's a fair point.  But why can't the working classes be represented by middle-class actors. I mean... they are actors after all.  There's plenty of home-county comics and dames who affect a colloquial accent to play houses in the provinces.

Rehearsed Reading of Shakespeare's "Eckythump it's Henry V!"
RADA showcase 1995

Do you have to be working class to play a working class character?

If you did 7 years at Eton, three years at Cambridge then the 1 year MA at GSA, is it distasteful to impersonate a member of the huddled masses?  Is it the same kind of thing as blacking up? Not blackface, but poorface?

It's a judgement call, and there are a range of opinions to suit everyone.  Personally I think this argument is overly-proscriptive. As soon as you entertain a taboo around poorface, the same arguments can be made about men playing dame being womanface, and then the whole artform's on shaky ground.

At the end of the day, acting is simply the art of pretending to be someone you aren't.   The more you try to restrict certain roles for certain demographics, the closer you get to a world where the only part you can ever play is yourself.  (Playing yourself may be OK for Hollywood movie stars, but unless you are Brian Blessed, being yourself probably wouldn't make a particularly good pantomime character.)

Brian Blessed performing as Brian Blessed
in Brian Blessed the Pantomime Experience! (1936-present)

However, there is a more subtle argument to be made.  Panto that's made by people that all look and sound the same will struggle to connect with an audience drawn from a rapidly diversifying national demographic.  Likely this problem's more pressing in urban centres than out in the Cotswolds, but nevertheless, it's coming to all of us. If we're going to make panto better we need to be broadening out our horizons in every direction, and that includes thinking about socio-economic class.

What can be done about it?

Well, it's tricky.  At a base level it's tricky for all the same reasons that casting for ethnic diversity's tricky.   

The industry has a supply side problem.  If you try putting downward pressure on producers to fix it through casting, it will simply become a demand side problem.  You can't cast people who don't turn up to audition.  Furthermore, I'm not convinced it's entirely fair: if you've worked hard and practiced and practiced so your singing and dancing and acting's top-notch, why shouldn't you get the job over somebody else just because they used to have free school meals and you didn't?

You can try putting the onus on the conservatoires, but the same question applies: doesn't fairness demand that the bar for entry be the same for all applicants?  After all, there are limited places available - getting offered a place is a zero sum game.  

This being said, the conservatoires haven't been idle.  Central have recently dropped their audition fees, which is something and every little helps, but if you're a hopeful from Hull, saving the £50 audition fee when the train fare to London is £200 seems a little like wissing in the pind.

In reality, the only way of ensuring equity of opportunity for those less able to access it, is to set aside places specifically for them.  But, when institutions start ring fencing spots for particular groups of people, they simultaneously squeeze the remainder of the applicant pool who must then reach a higher standard.  

If you want to give every young person the same crack of the whip, it's no good waiting until they turn 18.  By the time they're auditioning to get into Central, the chasm between those whose parents afforded them 10 hours of weekly tap, jazz and LAMDA lessons and those who could not is already so vast it is near insurmountable.

Any meaningful intervention would have to take place much earlier.  When do posh kids have their first ballet lesson?  Age 8?  Age 6? Age 4?  If we're really committed to evening out opportunities, then nothing will do except radical investment in arts education by the state.  And thanks to Liz Truss, we can't afford that!

Fleshcreep coming to collect the rent

In a world of such limited resources, imperfect measures such as ring-fencing, quotas and variable entrance requirements can be useful parts of a vanguard strategy to overcome specific barriers to participation.  It's worked pretty well with regard to ethnic diversity.  As talented non-white performers first punctured, then challenged, then revolutionised the white-dominated entertainment landscape, so they inspired a new generation of non-white British children - the same children who now, grown-up, are our current crop of young performers.  As frustrating as I'm sure it has been for those battling the system, in cultural terms it's all happened rather fleetly. Institutions that were basically all-white training schools only decades ago, now typically have cosmopolitan cohorts populated by white and non-white British and international students.  

Of course they do.  They're responding to market pressures.  Social media, Twitterstorms, fear of being canceled - producers are all under pressure to cast for ethnic diversity.  In a market where casting directors are actively looking for more non-white talent, drama schools which compete for on the basis of graduate prospects, are incentivised to seek out non-white students who can graduate into those roles.

However, the incentive for change exists only because the taboo against cross-racial casting clearly demarcates some roles as suitable only for non-white performers.  Whilst the genesis of this taboo lies in the sins of previous generations, it is constantly reinforced by audience's inherited distaste for seeing white performers pretending to be non-white.  (It is a visual art form after all).

The sins of previous generations

The reason there is no equivalent taboo that prevents middle-class actors from tackling working-class roles is simply because it cannot be seen by the audience.  Unless the performer is a celeb with well known working class roots, the audience simply have no way of knowing whether a competent actor started from palace or poverty.

No taboo means no market pressure.  No market pressure means no institutional change.  No institutional change means we're stuck with the quid pro quo.

You can't have more working class actors in panto without more investment in childcare, primary and secondary education, after school clubs and access courses.  Which I'm all for, but until the Chancellor gets out his cheque book, we may have to temper our expectations.

  

3 Things I've learned from Interviewing Panto Bigwigs

Clive Rowe stars in Mother Goose at Hackney Empire (Photo: Robert Workman)
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What a hectic few months! 

While everyone else has been sunning themselves in the April sun down at Skegness lido, I have been studiously interviewing dozens of panto professionals about their practice. I have interviewed writers, dramaturgs, directors, performers, CEOs, musical directors – all types of people, with the aim of understanding exactly what they are doing and why. 

Honestly, it’s been a blast. I’ve had such wonderful in depth discussions with people who really know their onions. The interviews were 30-60 mins long and were semi-structured around themes of pantomime and identity. 

 Big ticket items were: 

 

1. How are we/should we be responding to evolution in ethnic identities 

2. How are we/should we be responding to evolving ideas of sex/sexuality/gender 

3. How are we/should we be responding to disabled and neurodiverse identities 

I’ve still got a bucketload of comparative data analysis to do before I come to any conclusions. However, here are three general points worth noting… 

RANGE OF RESPONSES 

Range of responses... geddit?!  Because it's a range....
Oh, suit yourself!

On most specific questions, the range of opinions is broad. 

How broad? 

That depends on the question, but as a rule of thumb: probably broader than you imagine. Here are a few topics alongside some of the opinions I’ve heard, to give you an idea: 

DAMES:

• Dames shouldn’t be performed as drag, 
• Dames should be performed more like drag, 
• Dames shouldn’t impersonate women, 
• We must defend the tradition of men playing the Dame, 
• We should be encouraging more female Dames, 
• We should be writing more scripts without Dames. 

TITLES:

• We should drop Aladdin (and Morocco from Dick Whittington), 
• We must never drop Aladdin, 
• We should be phasing out Snow White,
• We should only stage Snow White IF we can cast little people, 
• We should be reimagining plots so they take place in Britain, 
• White creatives should restrict themselves to stories from white cultures. 

CASTING:

• We should hire the most talented people at the audition regardless of intersectionality, 
• We should earmark specific, or a specific number of, a number roles for actors with identity X and cast the most talented person who fits, 
• It is impossible to find actors who are identity X, 
• It is the job of the creative team to achieve diversity in the audition pool, 
• The cast should reflect the local audience, 
• The cast should reflect the national demographic.

Not every question prompts such an array of responses. Almost everyone is agreed that it’s time to stop racialised make-up and accents, so if you’re still doing that, you are in the minority. 

Of course, the joy of these interviews is that people give such thoughtful and substantive arguments to support their varied positions. The tricky part is working out how to piece them all together and use them to inform best practice. 

ANONYMITY 

Anonymous Monkey Bernard T. Chimpalot

A number of interviewees stipulated that one or more of their responses were off the record. 

Now I must stress that 100% of the people I have interviewed have been professional theatre makers sharing honest and thoughtful opinions which they have developed in response to their lived experience.   Nobody I have interviewed has been in the least bit ignorant, supercilious or exclusionary. 

And yet, on more than one topic, a number of these well-informed professionals felt that they couldn’t express their opinion honestly and openly for fear of opprobrium or backlash. 

This is not ideal. 

All opinions that are held in good faith should be listened to and responded to with thought and consideration. It is vital that this process of exposition, comprehension and rebuttal be undertaken without prejudice so that all parties are heard and challenged. 

The wonderful thing about opinions is that they can change. You can be persuaded by somebody’s real life testimony, contradicted by new data, deconstructed by an insightful argument… BUT ONLY if you are able to talk about it! 

People who are certain that they are right may present their opinions as fact, eradicating space for debate, and dismissing people they deem in the wrong. As a result they quash counterpoint in pursuit of unanimity of voice, which they mistake for unanimity of thought. This is a mirage. Closing down argument prevents the very process by which opinions may be changed. 

These are not open and shut topics with definite rights and wrongs; not everybody has thought about them in the same depth, or is informed by the same information or experience. Participation in the debate is crucial – we must be prepared to take a step back from our positions so that the whole community can engage and be persuaded. 

CAVEATS 

As you would expect, most opinions I heard were nuanced and came with copious context and caveats. One caveat that came up a number of times related to the size of the production. 

 I have a feeling that if the interviewees had unlimited resources, their responses would have been (at least somewhat) more closely aligned. However, many interviewees acknowledged that even the most laudable aims might be unpragmatic for productions in smaller provincial venues with limited budgets. 

For a small company, the problem with Snow White isn’t that it requires you to cast little people, but that it requires you to cast seven extra people. Even on questions where there was a fair bit of consensus on what we should be aiming at (e.g. ethnically diverse casting of Aladdin) there was genuine understanding that goals that are reasonable for big shows near London may not be attainable elsewhere. 

In many ways this is the biggest elephant in the room. We all know it’s there, there's no easy way round it, and it’s impossible to deal with it without watering-down or compromising our ethical positions.

How to make the best show we can using the resources we have is a conundrum that those of us working in smaller venues regularly grapple with. 

 It is frustrating to be held to a one-size-fits-all standard as though we all have the same capacity to respond as Crossroads e.g. in casting, rehearsal time, redesigning costumes/sets etc. It may be reasonable to expect shows with 20 performers in 2000 seat venues in urban centres, to cast diversely, extend their rehearsal times to accommodate needs of neurodiverse-performers or throw out their set because it has Chinese dragons on. However, these are huge aims for a show with 6 performers in a 160 seat theatre in a National Park. 

We should work towards an industry where this truth is more openly and regularly acknowledged. 

7 fantastic performers who won't be appearing together at a 200 seat venue

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 TL;DR

Less people agree with you than you think 

None of the arguments have been won yet 

We need to get real if we are going to set practical targets