There’s nothing like a Scottish pantomime dame

An amalgam of the centuries old Italian phenomenon of commedia dell’arte with the comic styles of the Scottish music hall in the 19th and 20th centuries, Caledonian panto is a law unto itself.

One of the major reasons for this is its continued emphasis on the art of the pantomime dame. In Scotland, the dame has to be a professional actor who, like the music hall comics of old, is able to be, simultaneously, a wise-cracking character performer, an ad-libbing, heckler deflecting comedian and a hilarious (and often preposterously unconvincing) transvestite.

This latter point is important. The Scottish dame falls, broadly, into two categories. Firstly, there are performers – going back to, surely, the undisputed king (or, should that be, queen?) of dames, the great Stanley Baxter – who are gay and purveyors of high camp.

Baxter was a trailblazer for Scotland’s gay dames, but not in a straightforward or uncomplicated way. As he told my colleague Brian Beacom (author of Baxter’s authorised biography), becoming aware of his homosexuality at a time when it was still a crime to be a gay man, Baxter has always struggled with being gay.

Today’s gay dames stand (in five-inch heels) in the drag queen tradition.

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These days, Baxter’s main successors – camp, gay dames who are aware of the political and historical significance of their drag roles – are Johnny McKnight (a tremendous writer, director and performer of pantomimes) and Alan Steele (a classical actor, whose drag roles extended beyond panto when, earlier this year, he took on the role of Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s famous comedy The Importance of Being Earnest).

This year (in addition to writing the pastiche panto for Glasgow’s Tron Theatre and the adult pantomime for Òran Mór), McKnight is the writer, director and (in the dame role of Widow McTwank) principal performer in the MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling’s staging of Aladdin (until December 31).

As ever with McKnight’s outrageously good panto performances, it will be a case of lock up your husbands as he sashays into the auditorium (and I say that as someone who almost sustained facial injuries from the actor’s roughcast pantomime breasts during a previous Tron Christmas show).

Steele can be seen donning frocks in the Byre Theatre, St Andrews’s production of Cinderella (until December 31). The actor has an excellent track record in the Fife town’s pantos, and his high camp performance is bound to illuminate this year’s show.

Alan McHugh with co-star Gary the Tank Commander

The other strand of Scottish pantomime dames, which is, arguably, distinct from the drag tradition, is what one might, for want of a better phrase, call the “straight” dame. These dames play upon a kind of comic masculinity that renders their female personas ludicrous.

So, for example, when they engage in comedic flirting with ostensibly heterosexual men in the audience, the joke isn’t (as it would be with McKnight or Steele) founded in heterosexual insecurity. Rather, the gag is about the preposterousness of the performer trying to pass as a heterosexual woman. Both scenarios depend on embarrassment, but the comedy is coming from two different angles.

For a fine example of the “straight” dame, you need look no further than Edinburgh’s big panto (which has relocated temporarily, during the redevelopment of Auld Reekie’s King’s Theatre, to the beautiful Festival Theatre). There, in The Pantomime Adventures of Peter Pan (until December 31), you can see veteran dame, and variety star extraordinaire, Allan Stewart strutting his stuff opposite uber-baddie Grant Stott and the talented Clare Gray (whose late father, Andy Gray, was a stalwart performer in many an Edinburgh pantomime).

Over on the west coast, not to be outdone, the Beacon Arts Centre in Greenock boasts the services of the excellent actor Jimmy Chisholm as a, no doubt, incendiary dame in its pantomime Beauty and the Beast (December 9-31). Playing opposite Still Game stars Jane McCarry and Mark Cox, Chisholm is sure to offer a performance full of effervescent humour.

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Reviewing last year’s Aladdin for the Greenock Telegraph, Amy Shearer opined: “Widow Twankey, portrayed by Jimmy Chisholm, is so naturally entertaining you forget there’s a script involved. When not scrubbing sparkly drawers, the pantomime favourite brings charisma and joy to the stage with hilarious patter and extravagant costumes.” And you can’t say fairer than that.

Last, but by absolutely no means least, in this guide to Scotland’s dames comes Mr Panto himself, Alan McHugh. As well as being the longstanding dame of the panto at His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, McHugh is the author of many pantomime scripts that are performed annually across the UK.

McHugh’s dame might be best described by the fine Scots word “glaikit”. Daft as a brush, with a tooth painted black to create a huge gap at the front of his mouth and painted-on eyelashes so huge that they’d embarrass a Kardashian, his much-adored character returns to the Granite City stage again this year, playing opposite Gary: Tank Commander in Sleeping Beauty (until January 7).

Jimmy Chisholm as Betty Blumenthal in Beauty and the Beast

Wonderful though Scotland’s panto dames are, it does make for a very male-dominated tradition. However, it is possible to do big stage panto without a dame, as headliner Elaine C Smith proves in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (until January 7) at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow.

The star of Two Doors Down and Rab C Nesbitt has made the famous Clydeside panto her own. Treading the very boards that hosted such great dames as Rikki Fulton and Stanley Baxter in the illustrious past, she leads a multi-talented cast that includes Johnny Mac, Blythe Jandoo and Darren Brownlie.

Whether it’s led by a great dame or, in Elaine C’s case, a grande dame of stage and screen, the Scottish pantomime – be it traditional, pastiche (as at the Tron) or strictly for adults (like at Òran Mór) – remains a formidable cultural force. In the age of Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime, we still need some good old music hall entertainment at Christmas time, oh yes we do!