30 years a Dame

Incred­ibly, Ber­wick Kaler has been doing the York panto for 30 years. We must have seen about 20 of them. This year, Dick Turpin — a new plot — or actu­ally the same plot with the char­ac­ters hav­ing dif­fer­ent names. Every year I just sit back as the cur­tain goes up and think “here’s two hours of totally enjoy­able non­sense.” Yes, it’s a bit self-referring because all the main per­formers have also been doing it for years — but it just gets more and more spec­tac­u­lar. And always fairly loc­ally groun­ded, with ref­er­ences to Acomb, and Knares­bor­ough, and the Three Legged Mare. Even the Vic­toria and Albert museum is adding a video of it to its archive of Brit­ish theatre — now there’s famous !