The History of Pantomime
Hello!
I hope that you all had a wonderful Christmas, I certainly did! I enjoyed spending time with my family and eating a fabulous Christmas dinner. However Christmas hasn't quite finished for me because I still have more family to visit and I have lots of fun to look forward to. One of my Christmas traditions is to go to the pantomime and yesterday my grandfather treated my family to an excellent show of Cinderella. Overall I really enjoyed the show and I had an amazing evening. Since I saw the show I have been wondering about the history of pantomime and my grandfather suggested that I might like to write a blog post about the history of pantomime. So I did some research about it and here is my blog post. I hope you enjoy it.
I am going to start by talking about pantomimes right now. Pantomimes always take place around the Christmas period and are usually based on popular children's stories for example Peter Pan, Aladdin, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. At Christmas time you will find pantomimes everywhere from the best theatres in the land to local village halls but all pantomimes are similar wherever you go. All pantomimes rely on audience participation and common examples of this are to cheer for the goodies and boo for the baddies. However sometimes members of the audience are involved in the show. At the pantomime that I saw the ugly sisters kept picking on a man at the front, in a humorous way of course! Most pantomimes also use a dame-like character that is a man dressed in a funny dress to look like a woman. In the pantomime that I saw, this comical part was played by two ugly sisters. Another common character is someone that is chatty and interacts with the audience, in the pantomime that I saw he was called buttons. The actors tend to feed off the audience's reactions to jokes and they often improvise slightly when things go wrong! But always, by the end of the pantomime, the villain has been defeated, true love has conquered all and everyone lives happily ever after.
Pantomime literally means "all kinds" of "mime" (panto-mime). Pantomime began as a type of traveling Italian street theatre known as Commedia dell'arte and it came to Britain in the 16th century. Over the centuries it has developed into a festive entertainment that is still beloved by modern audiences. Commedia is quite a physical type of theatre and it uses dance, music, tumbling, acrobatics and ridiculous yet amusing behaviour. Commedia troupes first performed in market places and fairgrounds. Whilst researching this I had a flashback to my drama lessons in year 7 where we studied Commedia! I even remembered some of the characters like Pantalone and Columbine. Pantomime and Commedia both have set types of character called stock characters. Like Pantomime, the characters in Commedia have set movements and gestures that represent their personalities. The characters in Commedia included the old man (Pantalone), naughty servants including Arlecchino, a lover, his lady and her servant girl (Columbine) who was in love with Arlecchino. There was also a clown or Pierrot character. The actors would wear masks and would not have a set script but would improvise on a story line.
When Commedia came to England it was a huge success and there was rivalry between the theatres over who had the best play.Within two days of a new performance opening at Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre in 1716, a show with an almost identical title opened at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. A manager of Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre and the Theatre Royal called John Rich was named the father of pantomime. This was because he was the first to realise the potential of Commedia characters. John Rich started calling his shows pantomimes and they slowly developed into what they are today.
It has been interesting learning about how pantomime started and I was really surprised when I found out that it actually came from Italy. I hope that you enjoyed finding out some more about the history of pantomimes.
Bye!
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| Peter Pan Pantomime |
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| Ugly Sisters in Cinderella |
So how did this tradition of pantomime start?
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| Commedia Masks |
When Commedia came to England it was a huge success and there was rivalry between the theatres over who had the best play.Within two days of a new performance opening at Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre in 1716, a show with an almost identical title opened at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. A manager of Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre and the Theatre Royal called John Rich was named the father of pantomime. This was because he was the first to realise the potential of Commedia characters. John Rich started calling his shows pantomimes and they slowly developed into what they are today.
It has been interesting learning about how pantomime started and I was really surprised when I found out that it actually came from Italy. I hope that you enjoyed finding out some more about the history of pantomimes.
Bye!
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