The theatrical stakes couldn't be higher. Christmas is, definitively, the
season of family theatregoing. A flop at Christmas spells unmitigated
disaster, not only for the family concerned. Many theatres plan their entire
year's budgets around a sell-out seasonal hit. Christmas shows run for twice
the length of a normal play, with a matinee most days. There is never a
back-up plan. And everybody, but everybody, must enjoy themselves.
And yet more and more theatres are taking the risk of hosting untried,
untested, “non-traditional” shows, sometimes with stupendously successful
results. But if there's no dame, no celebrity on his uppers, no song-sheet
and no one to boo, are there any rules of fine, alternative seasonal fare?
Here some of the genre's most experienced directors reveal ten of them:
1 Don't aim it at children
Oddly, this rule appears to be golden. Tom Morris, the associate director of
the National Theatre, explains: “If you find yourself saying: 'Let's make
this work for the kids', you've lost the plot. Working on Coram Boy with
Melly Still and then on War Horse, in neither did we ever think of them as
children's shows. We tried to present the situation and the characters as
truthfully as we could.”
Based on the Michael Morpurgo novel, War Horse tells the tale of a boy braving
deeply adult dangers in search of his horse in the First World War. “Just
allow the story to do the rest of the work. Our job is to create an
atmosphere in which children and adults can go there together.”
2 Do include lashings of gore, blood, and vengeful death
Tim Supple and Melly Still's Grimm Tales in the mid-1990s marked a sea change
in the genre. Extremely accomplished theatre, they were also very grim
indeed. Still went on to work on a string of equally celebrated, disturbing
family shows and is now bringing Cinderella to the Lyric. “Fairytales don't
shy away from violent feeling,” she says. “They are often very worrying and
challenging. Cinderella masquerades as a love story, but it's also a story
of casual abuse. When the sisters' eyes are pecked out by the birds [yes,
really] it's a fantasy of revenge. Children do have these very dark and
difficult feelings, and if you deny that expression, if you sugar the
stories, the child is denied his or her own experience.” Still's Cinderella,
drawing on a host of ancient sources, promises to be anything but sweet.
3 Wilfully ignore Christmas
By no means a universal rule. But the winsomely surreal poet and songster John
Hegley, whose BAC show last Christmas was a surprise hit, is clear. If you
aren't doing panto, do something completely different. Beyond our Kennel is
a case in point. “Kids can come,” he says, “but it aint ‘kid's theatre' [see
rule 1]. And it isn't a Christmas show. It's a good show that's on at
Christmas.”
Shows adhering to this rule can also enjoy a life after January. As Simon
Read, the director of Philip Pullman's anarchic, optimistic story The
Scarecrow and His Servant, explains: “You can't do panto in June. But a
Pullman or a Morpurgo adaptation? Why not? We want to create a thrilling
piece of family theatre. If you don't have a Christmas theme, you open the
door to the idea that it doesn't have to happen exclusively in December.”
John Godber has a less positive spin on the anti-Christmas angle. The author
of Bouncers has adapted the hugely successful Horrid Henry books for the
stage, with Horrid Henry: Live and Horrid. It eschews all seasonal japery
because, he says, “a lot of people are just trying to survive Christmas.
They don't need it shoved down their throats any more. So in my show there's
no ‘it's behind you' nonsense. Just a great story, abstract silliness, and
an awful lot of air guitar.”
4 Repeat, repeat, repeat
In this respect, family theatre looks much like panto. Told by an Idiot have
long been purveyors of exquisite alternative festive fare, with titles such
as Aladdin and now Beauty and the Beast. The director Paul Hunter explains:
“People are more averse to taking risks at Christmas; they do need something
familiar. Classic titles give you that. But once they're through the door,
if the world is convincing, you can completely explode their ideas of what
Beauty might look like, or what that story is about, which they might only
have experienced through Disney films. These stories are big enough,
archetypal enough, to allow you to reinvent them completely.”
Amazônia, by Paul Heritage and Colin Teevan, is a rare example of an entirely
new festive play, based on the life of the murdered environmental activist
Chico Mendes. It addresses deforestation and draws on a wealth of
traditional Brazilian dance and myth. “We're kicking against this idea that
you have to have a nostalgic title,” Teevan says, “but we're lucky. The
Young Vic has a reputation for doing exciting, different Christmas shows,
and people trust it. I think it's really important to create new stories, to
reflect the fact that ours is a multicultural society, and to offer more
than one perspective on Christmas.”
5 Don't indulge in visual stimulation
In Teevan's words, “children only need distracting when they're bored. They'll
sit through hours of entertainment if it's quality.” Tell a good, elemental
story, he says, and, in contrast to contemporary panto, a glut of
eye-watering effects will become an irritant, rather than a draw.
6 Oh no it isn't (vital to have audience participation)
Another cornerstone of the panto experience, entirely dispensable in
alternative Christmas shows. Anthony Clark directed the hugely influential
Red Balloon, and this year adapts The Little Prince at the Hampstead
Theatre. “People make a lot of odd assumptions about children,” he says,
“that they like bright colours and are obsessed with plot. They whip up an
audience into this mad, frenzied state, only to silence them, saying: ‘They
really enjoyed that.' I always think: ‘Did they? You just asked them to do
something and they very obligingly did it.'”
Chris Green begs to differ. In various high-camp incarnations, Green has been
entertaining the (adult) alternative Christmas crowd for six sell-out years.
This season he's Ida Barr, a pensioner with a flair for artificial-hip hop.
“At Christmas there's this sense of Bacchanalian misrule, people are more
willing to lose their inhibitions and pitch in. I try to take that as far as
I possibly can.” With a conga in the Barbican foyer, bingo and a singalong
with DJ Godslove, for starters.
7 Take yourself extremely seriously
Green very much excepted, another indispensable rule. The key to making good
seasonal theatre is always to “approach it with the same complete
seriousness, absolute respect and integrity as you would any other kind,”
according to Still.
8 (but not too seriously)
It falls to Alan Aykbourn, in his final season as the artistic director of the
Stephen Joseph theatre, to deliver the only definitive prohibition, having
programmed 37 panto-free Christmas seasons. “You cannot put on raw
Strindberg. You can, but it would be extremely stupid. Hamlet is another. If
everyone on stage is dead at the end, and it is Boxing Day, you have made a
very grave error of judgment. People need to feel encouraged at Christmas,
and they also expect a morality tale, where good is rewarded. But they don't
need patronising. I've always eschewed panto in favour of a play that
expresses a whole spectrum of emotions.” This year Northern Broadsides tell
the tale of Heidi through the eyes of an unruly band of goats.
9 Right all wrongs
So all right. Comedy, music, interactivity, stupendous sets and a sense of
nostalgia - all non-essential. And it's advised to take children to dark
emotional places. But leave them there, at Christmas, and you'll have a
revolt on your hands. In Amazônia a boy kills a bull and pulls its tongue
out (rule 2, check), but his dramatic quest is to revive it with the help of
his community. Teevan admits, even in his deeply unconventional play,
“redemption, the light returning, is the one storytelling element you really
can't do without”.
10 Be Cheap
As Morris concludes: “The bottom line is that the higher the ticket price, the
more people want to know what they're getting. The more they know what
they're getting, the less likely they are to have a truly transforming
experience. And once they are through the door the only rule is this: do not
fail to give them a really good night out. Everything else is up for grabs.”
