My Amazing Idea for a Mother Goose Costume and Why We're Not Going to Use it.

Not long now, boys and girls!

I live in Salford.

 

Honestly, it’s not as bad as it sounds.  I mean parts of it are, but those parts are a good 300m away from my house.  My street is full of panto producers and IT technicians.  Well, two panto producers and one IT technician.  It is a very short street.

 

However, the point is (was there a point?) you don’t have to stray far from the beaten track before you start seeing the word Juicy emblazoned gaily on female bottoms up and down the pavement.

An outfit I would never wear
or afford
or fit into

Now, this year we are producing Mother Goose in Saddleworth and Market Drayton, so OF COURSE, I wanted to have her appear in a pink jogging suit with the word GOOSEY across the bottom. 

 

For those that don’t know, Mother Goose is a morally coercive tale about a woman who sells her soul for beauty.  As a title, it’s become a lot more popular since Sir Ian did his tour (de-force?) a couple of years ago.  Most modern productions that I have seen try to update the very Victorian-Christian parable by thrusting the protagonist into a modern setting.  In these reimaginings, Mother Goose fritters away her newly begotten wealth on materialist trappings and twisted by the vainglory of her skin-deep-beauty becomes a shallow and grotesque mimicry of her previous self.  “So far, so non-blog-worthy,” I hear you ponder. (Would the people at the back, please ponder more quietly.  Thank you).  Oh, ye of little faith!  The sticking point comes in the fact that the common panto shorthand for materialistic and shallow is an upwardly-mobile working-class WAG.

 

Harry Harris' new book received ★★★★ from reviewers.
(Two stars from each).  Hurry - some copies still available!

Can’t you laugh at a WAG?  Of course you can, it’s a free country.  Laugh at whatever you like.  Furthermore, it’s a free market – produce whatever panto you like.  I do.

 

If I want to have a man come on in a woman’s romper suit with GOOSEY written in diamanté studding right across his bum cheeks – dagnammit, I will!  But I’m not going to.  Because I confess that, on balance, I am a teeny-tiny bit uncomfortable with staging a play in which I prompt the audience to laugh at someone for being working class.  The idea has more than a whiff of the Vicky Pollard about it.

I’m not saying you can’t find Vicky Pollard funny.  The same is true about GOOSEY in diamanté.  I think it is funny.  But I’m not sure that me-thinking-it’s-funny is funny, and I don’t think my audience would… a middle-class man pointing and laughing at working class women?!  It’s a gag I don’t mind leaving for somebody else.

Only £30.99!  Get them while they're hot!

 

And before I get accused of acquiescing to the cancel culture brigade, I’m not…

Honestly, I’m not.  I don’t mind sticking my head up above the parapet (as evidenced by my previous blog posts!).  

 

In fact, our production shies away entirely from class as a theme.  After all, vanity affects us all – regardless of class – doesn’t it?

 

I’m not the only panto producer having to wrestle with what jokes I should be making about whom.  Last year, Mother Goose at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham got slammed for overstepping their bounds with their vegan joke routine (“G is for gassy, A is for Annoying”).  Well, freedom of speech aside, I can’t help but agree with the journalist.  As a man who has lived hypocritically in an anarchic vegan circus commune, it seems blinkin’ obvious to me that whoever wrote these jokes isn’t a vegan.  For a start, they’re not true, and secondly, they’re not likely to be funny… to a vegan… that isn’t your personal friend.

 

Comedy is always going to be tricky to judge.  Funny often lies somewhere near the edge of safety, but a good heuristic for panto writers might be: if it’s a joke at someone else’s expense, don’t make it.

 

Even if you’re absolutely sure that the word play you’ve written confusing a rabbi and a rabbit is hilarious, and that no-one could possibly be offended when the dame comes on with floppy ears and ringlets, it’s probably best if you leave that gag for the Jewish panto.  Or, better yet, if you’re sure it’s a winner, email Nick Cassenbaum and gift the idea!  Imagine the bragging rights you’d get down the pub if it ends up getting included!  

You getting fangirled in the pub after getting a gag in Nick Cassenbaum's script

 

A note of caution

 

Even if you belong to a community, it mightn’t mean you have carte blanche to say what you want.  

At our in-house creative team readthrough of (what I had hoped was the final draft of) Aladdin, I was a bit perplexed when a sequence that sounded hilarious in my head raised a few eyebrows around the table.  

 

The sequence involved three metatextual gay jokes, centred around the stage direction “enter genie behind a big poof/puff.” (The poof in question shall remain nameless, but if you’re reading this, you know who you are!”)

 

The jokes were funny.  Preposterous.  Wordplay.  Nothing graphic, lewd or remotely suggestive.  And what’s more, I’m a gay writer, we’re a gay led theatre company, the actor in question (a dear dear friend) is gay, and furthermore, it’s 2024 so really – who gives a shit?  Certainly not the open-minded, progressive audience members of the West Yorkshire hills. 

TOP TIP: If Les Dennis isn't laughing, the joke isn't funny...

 

What I had failed to factor in (of course) is that none of those things were necessarily clear to the audience.  To someone who’d just come in off the street, all they’d have seen was someone come on and passive-aggressively out someone one stage in front of an auditorium full of people.* 

 

   (*97% full on average)

 

Of course, if you’re doing a gay panto, the fact that the actors are gay is pretty baked in (if you are doing a gay panto Aladdin and would like to use this joke, feel free… I will even waive my co-writing credit).  However, our panto’s not a gay panto (unbelievably – to anyone meeting the cast in the bar after hours), it’s a family panto, and even people who joke about gays with their mates probably don’t bring them home to their families.

 

Thankfully, my wonderful husband and company producer, Will Cousins, (huge managed to push me off the idea before scripts went out to actors.  I’m glad that he did.  I went with the rabbi/rabbit bit instead.

The Big Tiny's 2024 production of Mother Goose, coming to a theatre near you this Christmas*
*provided you live near Market Dragon or Saddleworth.  Limited tickets still available!

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.

  

ALADDIN IS CANCELLED!

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone...

It is official:

 ALADDIN HAS BEEN CANCELLED 

Forget everything you thought you knew about the 2023 Northwich Memorial Hall Christmas Pantomime, it's going to be Beauty and the Beast starring Les Dennis.

"I thought you said last week it was going to be Aladdin starring Les Dennis?" I hear you cry!

(If you didn't cry it, you just missed your cue -  this is a panto blog, keep up!)

I did say they were doing Aladdin... and they were... until they weren't.  Now they're not.

Twitter has spoken and Producer X has decided to change the production.

Well thank goodness for that! I've been losing so much sleep with worry.  I shall rest easy tonight!

In hindsight it all seems so obvious.  OF COURSE: all we had to do was CANCEL ALADDIN and now the world is a better place.

Say what you like about the people of Twitter, but when push comes to shove, they really are quite a lot better than ordinary people like us.

AND SO ENDS THE GREAT NORTHWICH PANTO DEBATE OF 2023

It's not every day you get to witness a full blown Panto Twitterpocalypse unfolding before your eyes.   We gasped, we cried, we said "ooh, it's Les Dennis".  It was great while it lasted, but all good things come to an end (except for the Möbius strip).

The panto title has been changed, the artwork redrawn and the infamous all-white cast-reveal tweet has been completely and totally deleted, and any/all traces of it have been scrubbed from the Earth, so that no man will evermore see it again.

Screengrab of the original tweet.

If this whole debacle has taught us all anything at all, it's that:

"It is racist to perform a play set in a China,"

Or was it that:

"It's racist to cast a play exclusively with white actors,"

HANG ON, I'VE GOT IT! 

The lesson we learned was:

"It's immoral to perform a story that was written by someone from another country,""

Or was it:

"if you can't cast a real Chinese Princess you can hire a white Princess Jasmine, just as long as the actor playing Les Dennis is black."

Whatever the lesson we were supposed to have learned is, I'm sure that it went something like this:

This production is X

The people involved are Y and not X

THEREFORE the production MUST BE CANCELLED

And surely we can all agree on that? 

 Or can we?

Aladdin, The Big Tiny 2022.  
Michael Pellman (Aladdin) and Will Cousins (Chinese Lion)*
*WARNING: Cultural appropriation... Will is a human and not a real lion!.

Quick bit of context...

For those that don't know, I'm currently researching a PhD in 'how contemporary British pantomime is responding to evolving ideas of identity.'

At the end of my research, I'll publish my thesis with recommendations for best practice across the industry, including what we are going to do with Aladdin.  Possible options are:

1.    We should cancel Aladdin.

2.    We should change Aladdin.

3.    We should defend Aladdin.

There are some interesting and nuanced arguments made for reimagining and/or scrapping Aladdin, which I'll be addressing in my next few posts.

But if I may, I'd like to leave the specifics aside for a week, and instead lay some groundwork by posing a question that gets to the nub of the matter:

"Why is everyone so bloody interested in identity all of a sudden?"

Identity is a dangerous game

IDENTITY POLITICS

At its core, identity is a privilege that we claim in order to get something we want.  It might be something important like fair treatment in job interviews; it may be something mundane like a parking space.

It works by drawing an imaginary line between two groups of people, an in-group made up of good-looking, clever and noble people like you, and an out-group for everyone else.

“we need a sense of difference or otherness in order to develop a sense of self or identity.”

Caroline Howarth, Eleni Andreoui "Nobody Wants to Be an Outsider”; 

From Diversity Management to Diversity Engagement p330 

My Actual Passport Photo

UNDER THE BONNET:  How does it work?

1. You want thing X (e.g a deadline extension, audition slot, sympathy, social change, etc.)

2. Make a claim to identity (race, religion, disability, gender, sexuality, political tribe, nationality...

3. Identify some characteristic or quality and differentiate between two groups

(Graduate vs school leaver, working class vs missile class, white vs global majority, professional vs am-dram...)

4, Argue that the group you're in deserves special consideration (e.g. weight my opinion, give me resources, invite me onto the management team...)

5. If all goes well, you end up with X and merrily carry on with your day

We all claim different identities when we think they'll be useful.  I claim my identity as a gay man every time I fill out a diversity form for a grant application. 

It can be a brilliant strategy for drawing attention to your situation, providing another point of view, and for redressing balance when things get out of kilter.

"You can't understand racism in the workplace because you're white.  I've been turned down for job after job, even when I've clearly been the best candidate by miles - at my last interview the manager asked me "where I came from... originally".  Big companies should have all-black candidate lists to make sure their workforce is representative."

🌸

IS IT JUST ME, OR HAS ANYONE ELSE NOTICED...

1.   In the past, people didn't think much about identity.

2.   Recently it seems like everyone's talking about their identity (particularly young people)

3.   People seem to be placing a lot of importance on certain core characteristics: sexuality, race, gender

4.   Recently there seem to be lots of new categories to sort yourself into: trans/cis, non-binary, neurodiverse etc.

5.   Other people's identity seem to be placing increasing demands on your own practice, e.g. pronouns, casting quotas etc.

Something's definitely different.  So what's changed?

Pretty much everything.

It's certainly true that until very recently (sociologically speaking), people didn't spend an awful lot of time thinking about who or what they were.  Not that it didn't matter.  Who or what you were mattered a lot: if you were a serf you had to toil on the land; if you were a king you could start a religion and chop your wife's head off.  

The thing is, up till quite recently, no matter who or what you happened to be, you didn't really have much say in the matter - you were who you were and that was that.  Complex webs of duties, oaths and obligations tied individuals to one another, and into much larger social structures.  Identity was not something that had to be thought about.  It simply was. 

In academic terms: in traditional societies, identity of the individual is an emergent property of social structure, characterised by predefined inter-personal relationships and mediated through reciprocal social interaction. TRY SAYING THAT AFTER THREE DOUBLE GIN AND TONICS!

For all their faults, many of the core qualities of traditional societies were strong and socially cohesive. Contrast this to the socially destabilizing qualities at the core of Modern Western Society. 

 

Table 1: Core qualities of traditional and modern Western societies 

	Traditional Societies	Modern Western Society
Culture	Monolithic	Multicultural
Ethnicity	Homogenous	Multiracial
Family structure	Extended, Village-wide	Nuclear
Power structures	Hierarchical	Democratic
Faith	Unitary	Multi-faith and Atheistic
Philosophy	Religious	Materialistic
Social	Conformist	Individualistic
Morality	Rigid	Permissive
Politics	Conservative	Liberal
Economies	Integrated	Capitalist
Gender Roles	Patriarchal	Emancipated
Social Permeability	Aristocratic	Meritocratic
Identity	Socially Negotiated	Self Determined
Overall Effect	Socially Cohesive	Socially Destabilising

 

This is problematic. 

 

The history of  pre-modern human civilisation is one of gradually increasing population size over thousands of years precipitating the incremental evolution of social structures into increasingly complex and organised societies. 

 

Now, in the comparative flash of a few decades, these social structures have gone, and society has been destabilised by an unprecedented and prodigious realignment of our core values. 

 

While this transition has gained us much in the way of personal freedoms and prosperity, there are some benefits that it forfeited.  One of these is the loss of emergent identity. 

 

For the first time in the history of human civilisation, people have been thrown onto their own devices to ask themselves some unsettling questions:

The unsettling answer:

You're nobody and you don't.

NOW HOW DO YOU FEEL?

Uneasy

Insignificant

Disconnected

EXISTENTIALLY ANXIOUS

How can you emotionally anchor yourself in a society where nothing is fixed?

Through the act of identification. 

"I am X.  X matters."

"I am trans, I am gay, I am black, I am a Muslim... "

"No.  You're a giraffe"

"So who's that rabbit you're thinking about?"

"How can you see through that box?"

"What box?!  Aaaagh!  Help, I'm trapped in a box!"

🈠

Everyone happy enough with the theory?

Good - It's important for what's coming next!

🈠

If you had a suspicion that things have changed -  You're right!

People are making more claims to identity, but that's because they're using identity to achieve something different.

The game we are all playing has changed and it happened while you weren't paying attention.

  

HOW PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY USING IDENTITY

1. You feel disconnected from society and experience existential angst

2. You make a claim to identity

3. Using some characteristic, you differentiate the in-group that you're in from "the out-group"

4. HOORAY!  Now you have a group!  A group full of people you like and are like, and not like the people from the out-group, (who nobody in the the in-group likes).

5. Finally, you feel like you fit in.  

6. Anxiety fades, you can go merrily on your own way.

Only you can't.

⾡

Unlike the previous example in which people claimed an identity in order to achieve something specific of value, now they might claim identity without any specific demands - the value is derived from the act of claiming identity itself.

You cannot go your own way.  Your in-group identity only makes sense in opposition to the out-group.

There can be no end.  Just perpetual introspection and struggle against 'an antithetical other.'  There is no end-game, no ultimate plan, no point at which you can say: "I've got what I wanted - I'm going to go and enjoy it!"

OK, you sent an angry retweet about a panto in Cheshire you'd never have gone to.  Everyone saw how not like those other people you are - how you'd never tweet headshots of only white actors, when Aladdin is a story from the SYRIA!  There are two types of people in this world: people who understand everything and are right, and people who think it's OK to set a pantomime in a foreign country - which is actually, as everyone you know has already decided is incredibly, incredibly RACIST.  And thanks to your tweet everybody can see how not-racist you are - which is why you've never produced a panto of Aladdin in Northwich, or anywhere else in mid-Cheshire for that matter, CERTAINLY NOT with with white actors and DEFINITELY NOT with  a Chinese font on the poster.  That is a !  Which now everyone knows - because YOU retweeted the poster - you commented : 'Another racist panto again!" and then THREE eye-roll emojis.  And thanks to your tweet, they've changed the production to Beauty and the Beast - which is one of the not-racist pantomimes because the foreign country it's set in is closer and has mainly white people living in it!  

Well done.  They'e pulled it.  Now what are you doing?  You're already scrolling through Twitter for something else you can rail against.

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Despite what you may have read in the statements of the UKPA, there are competing opinions amongst panto producers about how we ought best go about adapting our practice to accommodate everyone.  

Let's get down to brass tacks.  We're stuck on a rock hurtling through space at 66000 mph.  As far as we know, we get one go round and that's our lot.  I don't know a great deal, but I'm certain of this: we need more joy, less hate and we all ought to leave this planet in a better state than we found it.   

I want to support everyone, everywhere who identifies as anything at all: if it brings you joy then I'm 100% on board!  I remember when my cousin transitioned (M2F).  She was ABSOLUTELY bloody delighted every time she came out after surgery.  It took a few goes on the surgeon's bench, but she finally became the beautiful woman she always wanted to be, and every day since has been a total delight.  

GOOD LUCK TO YOU: If you're half as delighted to identify as religious, body positive, neurodiverse as I am to identify as gay, then the world and all that sail in her shall, in one voice, rejoice!  

However, if instead, it is the case that the recent tendency towards identification is a symptom, not of people attempting to improve their lot, but of ameliorating the existential anxiety that comes from societal dislocation, it is not clear what accommodations we could really make (if any) that would ever be sufficient to help.  

We all got into panto producing because we want to bring joy to the world.  It's panto - it's supposed to be joyous and fun - and everyone's invited to play along!  But for whatever reason, some people come and don't play.  They pitch up on the other side of a battleground - and suddenly we've stopped playing "let's make a better panto for everyone to enjoy," and started a never-ending game of "What identity do I need to claim to find what you are doing offensive?"  

They didn't come here to watch the panto.  They didn't come to observe, or discuss or, god-forbid, be entertained. 

What if we did?  We could CANCEL ALADDIN.  Could we at least move on?

I think not.

 They came here to shout:"CANCEL ALADDIN," not because they want to see Beauty and the Beast, but to be seen shouting.

The truth is, there is no end to the demands that could be made:

BAN Aladdin because it's cultural appropriation

BAN Snow White because it exploits little people

CANCEL the dame because it lampoons gender non-conformity

ESTABLISH quotas to ensure 50% of every cast is from the global majority

INSIST that 50% of the cast are obese, to better represent the audience

DEMAND all productions of Dick Whittington employ a Moroccan actor to perform the role of the Sultan

STOP throwing out sweets because they rot kids teeth

BAN the dame slapping the comic over the head because it encourages domestic violence

WRITE asexual love stories to promote diversity (this has already been suggested)

SILLY Billy must not be silly, because it otherises children with SEND

BAN innuendoes as they provide a barrier to enjoyment to religious families

PHASE OUT the fairy godmother, because it encourages children to engage in magical thinking

RETIRE the ghost gag and replace it with something less scary - a rabbit gag!

AND so on...

AND also...

AND another thing...

The day you wield identity as a weapon, is the day that you cross the Rubicon.

Acquiescence is not a viable option.

I love panto.  I love it so much I make it professionally and spend 3 years researching it for my PhD.

            If I'm going to have to fight for it, then I will.

              If people make demands instead of making their case, 

                    my recommendation for best practice is likely to be...

"We need to meet this head on.   

Once more unto the breach dear friends.

Fight the good fight, comrades.

Don't give 'em an inch."