oh yes it is

I went to a pantomime this afternoon.  I'm not sure exactly how many years it is since I last went to one, but it certainly can't be since the early 1970s.  My aunt used to take my brother and me to a West End panto when we stayed with her in Woking during the Christmas holidays.  I remember seeing The Wind in the Willows.  I don't know who was in it, but can still recall the powerful smell of cap guns in the fight between the good characters and the wicked weasels.  And we saw Dorothy Tutin as Peter Pan, which counts as a small milestone of theatre history, and a very young Fiona Fullerton as a fairy in something or other.  I don't remember what, but it was before her television appearance as a nurse in Angels, and I felt smug watching that on the TV because I'd seen her live.

Today's panto was not such a grand affair, but very jolly.  It was staged by one of the local amateur groups, and I went along because my niece was in it.  Indeed, she was the youngest member of the cast, having met the minimum age requirement for taking part by five days.  It was not a shoe-in, either.  There were proper auditions, and not everybody got a part.

So my parents invited me along, and we sat in a row with my niece's proud co-grandparents (that's my brother's mother and father-in-law.  Try to keep up at the back) and my brother and his wife and the twins sat a couple of rows in front of us, all ready to show family solidarity.  It was my sister-in-law's second time around, since she'd been to one of the evening performances in the week to show some motherly support.

The village hall was smaller than I remembered it, but I suppose I was last there for a Farmer's Market, when it was not so full of chairs.  I should think it had every chair you could legally set up and still nominally obey the fire safety regulations, although my father looked at the throng of people and the two exits at the front, and remarked tranquilly that if there were a fire he did not expect any of us to get out alive.  The village would like a new hall, one with more capacity and that was easier to heat, but since Colchester Borough Council believes that they are well supplied with community leisure facilities, that probably isn't happening any time soon.

It turned out to be a very fine panto, performed with great gusto.  There was singing, and dancing, and some monumentally bad puns fully up to Now Show standards, and brightly coloured sets, and a Sultana of Morocco (cue more puns) as well as the traditional Dame.  There were local in-jokes, digs at surrounding villages, and a spoof Titanic moment that genuinely made me laugh a lot.  My niece acquitted herself with aplomb.  I found myself happy to join in with an audience participation song originally from the music halls, which it happened I already knew, and as unable to shout Oh Yes It Is and Oh No It Isn't as I was when I was eight.  (My aunt used to nudge us when the London pantomimes invited boys and girls to go up on to the stage, and I always thought that was an appalling prospect.  Over forty years on, I still make sure to sit far enough back at live comedy shows that I can't get picked on).

The village hall did not have air conditioning, and as we left at the end I suddenly realised that fresh air was a terribly good idea.  That, and being able to stand up, which is probably why as we walked back to my parents' house we were not as quick as we should have been to duck inside somewhere when it started to rain.  The rain developed into a torrent.  Water fell in sheets, mixed with hail, while lightening flashed, but by then we'd left the last pub so far behind that it made more sense to go on than to turn back.  We were three very soggy people by the time we reached my parents' front door.  I was not expecting it to rain at all, otherwise I'd have worn different shoes, and I didn't think you were supposed to get thunderstorms in January.  Still, it was a good pantomime.