PANTOMIME UPON AVON

Wairarapa Times-Age, 17 November 1941, Page 7

PANTOMIME UPON AVON

He must be a priggish Shakespearean who would resent the news that the Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon is the be the scene of a big pantomime this Christmas, says the “Manchester Guardian.” As a matter of fact, Shakespeare’s plays contain many elements of pantomime, including ample violence, bulbous red noses, men miming animals, fairy queens, and young women who insist on getting into men’s attire. It was the Bard who gave us Bardolph, with as fiery a snout as ever lit a beacon on a musichall stage, and he, too, who gave us in Viola, not to mention Rosalind and Imogen, the principal of all principal boys. His tavern hostesses, who were in fact played by men, are first cousins to the pantomime dames whom our drolls annually present in the roaring, leering, arms-akimbo manner. True, the Shakespearean clowns and maidens spoke and sang in a different idiom. But they were the same motley, rolled cut the similar barrel, and showed no less handsome a leg.