The Snow Queen

This was a ‘home-made’ pantomime in every sense of the word, a member of the Society, Louise Anne Bateman having written the piece and Anika directing for the very first time. Although the direction lacked a certain amount of finesse, the panto, together with many home-made costumes and minimal props still made an enjoyable afternoon’s entertainment, if the happy reaction of the children in the audience was anything to go by.  All the traditional elements of a Panto were included. Sweeties were handed out, a song for the audience to join in, all the usual trappings of ‘He’s behind you’ and ‘Oh no it isn’t’ etc lustily entered into.  Slapstick comedy is really not my scene with the old bucket of water (which turns out to be glitter paper) thrown over the audience, but the very young members of the audience appreciated the joke. I said last year perhaps this should be reviewed as a junior production with nearly 30 youngsters ranging in age from about 5 to 15 years of age dancing and singing with great enthusiasm. If we didn’t encourage the younger generation to fall under the spell of Amateur Dramatics then the future of our societies would look very bleak and undoubtedly many of these children had learned a great deal since last time. They were exceedingly busy with innumerable changes of costume and twelve musical numbers to remember. The twelve adult members of the cast worked hard to bring us the story line which was a very unusual version. Kevin Wort came over well as the Prince singing ‘Accidentally in Love’ with great feeling, Glen Cowlard gave an outstanding performance as the Pirate King singing my favourite number from the show ‘Yo Ho’ with all the young pirates and Beccy Cowlard’s brilliant interpretation of Mrs Wolf made me sad that she wasn’t on stage more.  All the other principals came over well in their various roles telling the story clearly and generally entertaining the audience of predominantly very young children, parents and grandparents etc, I do feel that a show lasting two and three quarter hours is too long but, of course, as in all good Pantomimes, everything ends happily. 

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