English Pantomines – Their History

English Pantomines Their History

English Pantomines Their History

I have many ancestors from London who were members of various Theatre companies so I have created this article on English Pantomines which I hope is of interest to the reader.

The pantomime first arrived in England as entr'actes between opera pieces, eventually evolving into separate shows. Between 1660 and 1843 only two theatres in London were allowed to put on plays with prose. Other theatres had to put on other forms of entertainment to survive, such as music and dance, circus, and stories told in rhyming couplets and mime. Sometimes these proved more popular than the plays so that it was the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London was one of the licensed theatres, which put on the first performance of an entertainment with pantomime in the title in 1717. ( Which theatre still exists and which shows excellent Pantomines and Plays ).

In Restoration England, pantomime was considered a low form of opera, but without Harlequin. In 1717, actor and manager John Rich introduced Harlequin to the British stage under the name of 'Lun' (for 'lunatic') and began performing wildly popular pantomimes. These pantomimes gradually became more topical and comic, often involving as many special theatrical effects as possible.Colley Cibber and his colleagues competed with Rich and produced their own pantomimes, and pantomime was a substantial (if decried) subgenre. According to some sources, the Lincoln's Inn Field Theatre and the Drury Lane Theatre were the first to stage something like real pantomimes (in the later sense that has become codified with its fairly rigid set of conventions), creating high competition between them to put on the more elaborate show.

William Beverley was responsible for the introduction of the transformation scene into pantomime. In Planche's 'Island of Jewels' in 1849 he designed a scene in which a desert island turned into the Island of Jewels of the title. This was the final act of the performance, whereas today the transformation scene generally occurs in the last scene before the interval.

As manager of Drury Lane in the 1870s, Augustus Harris is now considered the father of modern pantomime.

There seems to be some disagreement among scholars as to exactly when the true modern pantomime genre got started. The first modern Cinderella Pantomime in England was the 1804 production at Drury Lane, dir. Mr. Byrne, with music by Michael Kelly (1762-1826).

The Part of Mother Goose whereby a man dresses up as a woman, began in 1902 , when DAN LENO took the part of Mother Goose and set the standard for subsequent modern pantomime dames.

Please visit my Funny Animal Art Prints Collection @ http://www.fabprints.com

My other website is called Directory of British Icons: http://fabprints.webs.com

The Chinese call Britain 'The Island of Hero's' which I think sums up what we British are all about. We British are inquisitive and competitive and are always looking over the horizon to the next adventure and discovery.

Copyright 2010 Paul Hussey. All Rights Reserved.

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