Les Dennis Miserables

HUGE NEWS: Les Dennis will be appearing in Aladdin in Northwich this Christmas!  

I know because a local producer, (let's call them Producer X), tweeted about it this week. 

 

The tweet showed three of the actors in the upcoming cast. All three of them white.  

 

Despite Producer X's best efforts to point out that the rest of the cast is yet to be announced (including the titular role of Aladdin), the whiteness of the actors in the image ruffled sufficient feathers that the original message was retweeted over 100 times. 

 

Not replied to, mind you: retweeted. 

 

Over 100 people felt so aggrieved by the fact that all the actors shown in the tweet were white, that they felt they deliberately pushed the Tweet to more people (accompanied by a short message that made their outrage clear). 

 

“If you can’t cast Aladdin appropriately, DO ANOTHER PANTO.” 

“It’s racist panto season AGAIN!” 

“How have they not got the message?” 

“DIDN’T THEY LEARN THEIR LESSON AFTER LAST YEAR?!” 

 

Now, I don’t want to cast aspersions on the good people of Twitter: if you’re going to sell someone an axe, you’ve got to let them grind it, but I struggle to imagine that they care very much about the Northwich pantomime. I would even go so far as to suggest that a limited number of them have likely ever seen the Northwich pantomime... nor perhaps even be able to point Northwich out on a map. 

 

The retweets were not aimed at helping Producer X improve the quality of the panto offer, nor at the good people of mid-Cheshire who may be buying a ticket... they were aimed to demonstrate the depth of righteous outrage to one’s followers. 

 

I felt particularly sorry for Les Dennis who was '@'ed in with the comment “National treasure: not after this you’re not!” 

 

Poor Les!  

I love Les Dennis.  

He was brilliant in Port and Spring Wine at the Bolton Octagon. 

 

What was Producer X to do? He's already hired the actors: Les Dennis bought his MegaBus ticket to Northwich Bus station the same day he signed the contract! He's not going to relocate the narrative from Peking to Greater Manchester – he hasn't got the costume track. Instead, he did exactly what anyone else in his position* would do: he took the tweet down and hoped it would blow over. 

    * I thank my lucky stars that I’m not in this position.  We are staging Aladdin in Bury this year - we were super fortunate to audition and have our offers accepted by two supremely talented (and super lovely) performers from the global majority... in fact, the whole cast are amazing.  Why don't you buy a ticket and see for yourself?

 

It’s not a bad shout. Producer X has been a little unlucky to have his partial cast announcement blow up as it did.  The people who RTed aren’t checking daily for APB’s latest cast announcements. They saw it on somebody else’s feed and piled in. 

 

Don’t reply but run away and live to tweet another day. 

 

THE HYPOTHETICAL...

Twitter’s not a great forum to engage in nuanced debate. There are thought-provoking and legitimate questions to be asked about how we cast and produce titles like Aladdin. None of these can be effectively summarised in a sentence, no matter how pithy you are with a retweet. 

 

However, if I can, for a moment, shelve these legitimate questions, and in their stead proffer some examples of replies that could have been sent, but weren't:

 

 

APPETITE WHETTING TRAILER: 

 

For anyone who is interested in the big issues, the following deep dives will be winging their way to thepantoblog over the next few weeks: 

 

(1) the history of Aladdin,  
(2) Understanding and responding to legacy of colonialism and orientalism,  

(3) the causes and effects of evolving ideas of identity on contemporary casting practice,  

 

...SO KEEP YOUR EYES PEELED!