If you’re looking for subtlety, if you’re looking for sophistication, wit, intelligence and a stirring of fine feelings among fellow human beings sharing a belief in how the world should be ordered if only life could more closely imitate art and reason, then my recommendation is that you avoid pantomime and conservative party conferences.
Pantomime, for those who didn’t grow up in a pre-internet Britain, is a very British form of theatre entertainment conceptually not a million miles from the mystery play. That is to say, pantomime is red nose entertainment with a message of social conformity, that comes around once a year during the winter. The message is moralistic and simple, the presentation is lurid and loud. Extravagant, ridiculous, easy to digest. Pantomime is participatory. The actors address the audience directly, egging them on, prompting them with asides. The audience, thus egged and prompted, jeers and boos, bellows and howls from the shadows of the auditorium. We all have a generous helping of belly laughs and go home rosy-cheeked and ready to put our shoulders to the wheel once again, feeling slightly more superior now we’ve condemned the wicked witch and the abusive lord to ridicule, oblivion, prison etc. Pantomime has a rich history in Britain – a small, confined nation that needs its scapegoats.
Today, I found that I could no longer hold my breath. I’ve been sitting in the back row since July, my arms tightly folded, repulsed yet attentive, unable to look or walk away and trying not to externalise the building horror I felt inside: the leadership contest, the hustings, the staged interviews, and now, my god, the newly crowned crooked-hatted queen tee and her loyal, creepy entourage of crumpled ne’er-do-wells. THIS IS PANTOMIME I thought. There, on the stage this week in Birmingham, was the ludicrous grinning red queen squinting fiercely from the stage in her hook-collared garment, annunciating boldly from a stilted script, breaking the third wall with diabolic hyperbole. ‘Get…them…re-moved!’ (ed: unscripted) The audience, her audience, duly acknowledged, leaping up to purge their fantasy world of undesirable elements, vocalising with an abandon they could never otherwise permit in their monogrammed cufflink lobbydom. The scene lacked only diminutive party members jabbing holographic depictions of Kier Starmer with plastic swords while cabinet ministers pranced around her queenship’s skirts in pantomime horse costume, shackled and squeezing their sphincters to avoid materially undeniable public embarassment, hoping upon hope their spouses aren’t watching. Only ,we were the audience, not those in the auditorium. They were the braying crowd, and we were here for what? To self-instruct? To jeer the jeerers, they in their turn being the cast of hyperboles and we the moralistic stone-throwers? So 21st C: multilayered moralism.
And yet, meanwhile, in the meagre sunlight outside this theater of the absurd multiplied, ordinary joes and joannas are wondering how to repair the actual, financial distress suddenly wrought upon their household budget – their actual lives – by Queen Tee and her cast of bell-hatted jugglers.
This is not pantomime after all. It is real life, made pantomimic.
