British Pantomime Performance

British pantomime, a blend of commedia dell’arte and vaudeville-style performance, uses cross-dressing, familiar children’s stories such as Cinderella, and shouts from the audience as the basis for its matchless theatrical spectacle. Millie Taylor’s British Pantomime Performance explores how pantomime creates an interactive relationship with—and potentially transformative experience for—its audiences.

In its uniquely British form, pantomime draws viewers into the story through an engagement with the hero, an empathetic attachment to the success of the quest, and a complicit relationship between actors and spectators as they unite to create the live performance. A heady combination of slapstick, dance, and witty repartee, British pantomime strives to seek balance between the intellectual appreciation of artifice, the chaotic possibilities of interactivity, and the emotional engagement of narrative storytelling. British Pantomime Performance digs beneath the jokes to force a reevaluation of pantomime’s importance as a dramatic art form.