Twelve Shows Before Christmas: A Field Guide to Not Falling Over in a Panto Costume

There's a moment, usually around the 18th of December, when you're standing in the wings in a dress covered in battery-operated fairy lights that have started a small fire on your hip, and you think: this is the job. This is the whole job.

I've done ten panto seasons. I've played everything from a fairy to a henchman to, once, the front end of a horse (do not ask). And I'm here to tell you that panto is simultaneously the hardest and best work an actor will do all year. Here's the survival manual nobody hands you with your contract.

Rule One: The Audience Is the Fourth Wall, and Also the Show

Every panto has its regulars. The mum who laughs louder than the kids. The grandad who heckles the Dame with the timing of a seasoned professional. The toddler who screams during the ghost scene like they're being exorcised.

Do not fight them. Join them. The best heckle response I ever gave was to a seven-year-old who shouted 'YOU SMELL' during my villain monologue. I looked him dead in the eye and said 'So does your packed lunch, apparently.' His mum cried with laughter. He's now my biggest fan and sends me Christmas cards.

The trick is never to win. You want the audience on your side even when you're supposed to be evil. Especially when you're supposed to be evil.

The Quick-Change Is a Contact Sport

In panto, you have roughly forty seconds to become a completely different person. This is not a metaphor. My record is a full costume, wig and beard change in thirty-eight seconds, achieved through a system I can only describe as 'organised chaos with velcro'.

What they don't tell you: your dresser is the real star of the show. Mine — a woman named Pat who has worked every panto since 1987 — can strip a bodice, swap a wig and reattach a false nose in the time it takes the audience to sing 'if we go down to the woods today'. I have offered to name children after her. She declined, but I think she was touched.

Invest in magnets. Invest in velcro. Never, ever invest in buttons. Buttons are for people with time.

Fuel Strategy: The Mince Pie Economy

Two shows a day, twelve days a fortnight, on a diet of whatever the interval queue at the kiosk provides. You learn quickly that a mince pie at 4:45pm is not a snack — it's a strategic decision that will determine whether you can hit the top note in the finale.

My personal system: proper lunch at noon, half a banana in the wings at the interval, and absolutely nothing with icing before the slapstick scene. I learned that last one the hard way in Woking, 2019. There was a slide. There was a pie. The pie lost.

Why We Keep Coming Back

Here's the thing about panto that makes the tights and the fairy lights and the small fires worth it: it's often a child's first ever show. Somewhere in that audience is a kid who'll go home and put on a play in the living room, who'll remember the man in the silly dress shouting 'oh no he isn't' for the rest of their life.

I was that kid. Sat in the stalls in Southend, absolutely certain the genie could see me, personally. Twenty years later I was the one in the tights, and a small boy in row F pointed at me and gasped like I was magic.

I was, love. For about ninety minutes, I absolutely was.

So if you're doing your first panto this year: hydrate, befriend your dresser, respect the hecklers, and never trust a costume with buttons. It's chaotic, it's exhausting, and it's the most fun you'll have in tights.

Merry Christmas. Oh yes it is.