Rufus Hound in panto

It does annoy me that they've kept the dames but mostly got rid of the principal boy. Not only is that fewer roles for women but the woman got to play the clever, plucky hero of the piece and counterbalanced the man playing the shrewish, comical dame. Bring back the principal boy!

Totally agree and many traditional pantomime dames would agree. One said to me once that he thought the Dame and the Boy balanced things out in terms of the weirdness of cross-dressing.

It's all about different kinds of opposites, things looking one way but being another, or saying they are one thing when they obviously aren't.

It's a very British kind of humour that you see in other places like Monty Python, or even P.G. Wodehouse.

The exotic elements that also aren't PC now are sometimes part of that, but also often originate from a time in the not really so distant past when travel and access to other places was much more limited for most people.Often they weren't ever intended to be realistic.

I had no idea it was supposed to be Chinese? Every day's a school day!

I think that in the days of the Arabian Nights they just used "in China" to mean "a very long way away in a mysterious land" which is why it's such a strange hodge podge. It's not actually from the original 1001 Nights, it was inserted in from another Arabic source by a French translator.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aladdin

The British panto version of the story goes big on the Chinese element, probably because it gave the Edwardians additional opportunities for exotic costumes and jokes about Chinese names in a way that ranges between somewhat problematic to indisputably horribly offensive. but the Disney version tidied it up by relocating the story back to a Middle Eastern city. Hence Americans just know it as an Arabian story whilst most Brits simultaneously know the Chinese and Arabian settings without ever consciously clocking that something strange is going on. I read up on it when DC were tiny because I found myself reading them the 1001 Nights version from a storybook and not understanding where it was actually set.

Which is a major digression but actually explains why Mr Hound got into such a mess. He did "evil eyeliner" and because he hasn't started rehearsals yet he didn't realise that his character, Abanazer the Grand Vizir, is actually meant to be Chinese, and hence his eyeliner made him look like a racist stereotype.

Or possibly Wrong People's Corner...

Some aspects of drag or individual drag artists I find unpleasant, but pantomime dames don't bother me. It does annoy me that they've kept the dames but mostly got rid of the principal boy. Not only is that fewer roles for women but the woman got to play the clever, plucky hero of the piece and counterbalanced the man playing the shrewish, comical dame. Bring back the principal boy!

Isn't it also interesting that the theatre world is at forefront of performative wokeness but, when it comes to it, just cares about making money? They bang on about the cross-dressing aspect of panto being subversive but get rid of the principal boy because they've already cast an attractive, young female star as the princess and they know it will be more commercial to attract a soap hunk or ex-boybander in the lead male role. They've probably run workshops on toxic whiteness or fragile white tears or whatever, but they cast a white actor in a Chinese (via Arabia) role because it's about getting a household name and selling seats.

Surely Aladdin is one of Scheherezade's stories and so from the One Thousand and One Nights and so a Middle Eastern Folk Tale? Like Sindbad and Ali Baba.

No?

I love a panto. But if you give it an iota of thought, they're problematic on so many levels.
The entertainment works if you suspend usual belief/value systems and just accept it for what it is. Someone has already said - they're a bit naughty and subversive but dressed up as comedy and you are invited to laugh along. I think it's a very old and very English form of humour. The dame as played for laughs by a male actor is nonetheless pretty misogynistic, however funny it is.

Yes, I just looked this up and saw that one of the leading tweeters on this is a drag queen! Talk about hypocrisy!

Culture doesn't work that way, ideas don't work that way, and acting doesn't work that way.

[quote Hdhdjejdj]@Quaggars I don’t find dames offensive either. What’s interesting is how Rufus Hound is being criticised/cancelled/called out on twitter and the loudest of these voices is a drag queen.[/quote]
Tell me someone is highlighting the hypocrisy?

I'm about to give a talk on pantomime & the dame, and what I'm going to argue is that yes, the Dame has long been seen as a cuddly English eccentricity. But, when you think about the social/ cultural politics of the Dame, she's really not an innocent fun character - she emerges at about the time Queen Victoria started visibly ageing, getting very stout, and in mourning for Albert. Pantomime Dames were perhaps a kind of knee-jerk reaction to being ruled over by such a woman. By a woman, period!

Pantomime exists in that gap between what is 'proper' or appropriate, and what is outrageous, offensive and inappropriate. It is deliberately naughty in all sorts of ways. This sense of Misrule goes back to pre-Christian religious festivals of mid-Winter. The Janus face, facing both backwards & forwards; the depths of mid-winter meaning that spring is on its way; and the brief moment of turning authority upside down - the child rules, (in Christian mythology, a baby is born as King of the world), and so on ...

I think a lot of people outside of UK don't understand panto, which to be fair is pretty bizarre and plus its Twitter. So you take something silly, lighthearted and meaningless entertainment and turn it into something deliberately offensive and not just literal but actual violence.

Jaysmith71 😂

"Problematic eyeliner" according to one concerned Twitterer

I remember the transfer of Miss Saigon to Broadway when Johnathan Pryce was blackballed when American Equity said a half-French, half-Indochinese man had to be played by an Asian-American.

And then there's Fagin in "Oliver!" who in all Broadway productions is not Jewish. Dear me no. Wherever did you get that idea?

t's a Syrian tale set in the exotic Orient by someone who didn't know much about Chinese culture, which is why it's got a Sultan and a Grand Vizir and all the names are Arabic.

So can we blame the Syrians for cultural appropriation? Or is that racist?

It's probably not correct to say that Dames were played by men when we have no conclusive information on their gender identities. I cannot recall a single actor who played a Dame declaring their gender identity. For all we know, all Dames have been women.

It's theatrical dress , its a costume. If rainbow dick monkey can stand in today's woke world so can panto costumes. Blame the library they started this....