How do you explain panto to an Australian?

“What exactly is pantomime?” my plus one asks me. Forgive him. He’s Australian. This uniquely British phenomenon hasn’t caught on down under, and trying to explain to him exactly what it is and why it’s such a fixture on the festive calendar is like trying to describe colour to a person who’s been blind since birth.

The only way, I soon realise, to explain it to him is to take him along to his first panto, and my first in about 20 years. And so we find ourselves standing in the lobby of the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh, him unsure what to expect, me rehearsing my rusty “oh no he isn’t!”

The closest I’ve come to describing panto to Aussie Boy is telling him that it’s a traditional fairytale where the male characters are played by women and the women are played by men. “So which fairytale is this one based on?” he asks as we take our seats. I can’t remember (turns out it’s Cinderella) but I explain that it simply doesn’t matter; the storyline remains the same regardless. “So why do people go every year?” he asks, puzzled. This is going to be a long night.

I never really considered just how odd panto is until I tried to explain it to a foreigner. It’s a unique slice of British life, but it’s distinctly weird. It appears to be for children but the theatre is packed with adults. The themes are child-friendly, but the jokes are designed to appeal to the grown-ups. It’s exactly the same every single year, but we can’t get enough of it. It’s camp yet knowing, fluffy yet razor-sharp.

I’m bombarded by questions throughout the first half: “So we have to boo every single time the bad guy comes on stage? Every time?” Yes. “Why do they keep breaking character? Is this deliberate?” Yes. “Why is the singing so bad? Is that ‘all part of the fun’ too?” Um, no.

Come the interval he heads off in search of ice cream and returns with a glow stick. He’s clearly getting into the spirit of things. By the end of the second half he’s doing the singalong and laughing along to Hearts vs Hibs in-jokes which I doubt he could possibly understand. Later, as we are spewed out onto the cold street, I ask him, amid a fog of cigarette smoke and over the din of screaming weans, what he thought.

“I liked the woman who played Cinderella’s mother” he says. “That was a man,” I reply.

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