‘Loud, brash and in your face’ – how to be a panto dame

“It’s behind you!” is ringing around the theatre aisles, so it must be time for pantomime actors to take to the stage in one of Christmas’s most important roles – the dame.

Over-the-top, camp and butch, with heavy makeup, big hair and large gestures, the season’s most flamboyant, matron-like men put on their drawers to tread the boards and make everything go pear-shaped.

We caught up with four stars of the stage as they donned their costumes and sequins to come up with a list that enables a dame to steal the show.

The consensus was someone who is warm, funny, loud, brash and larger than life, with jokes for the children and adults alike but they cannot be a shrinking violet.

Aunty Pru, aka greengrocer Nick Downes, is performing in the Snow Queen at the Birchmeadow Centre in Broseley, Shropshire, and said: “I think you have to interact with your audience, make them feel welcome, not overwhelmed, and make them enjoy their experience.”

According to Downes, the dame is the character the audience most expects to see “making perhaps a fool of herself”, adding: “I think that’s what a dame should be.”

Cinderella’s supermarket-inspired sisters, the “cheap and cheerful” Aldianna and Lidleena, are played by Sam Rabone and Matt Daines at the Garrick in Lichfield.

Lidleena said: “We are the people that people look forward to coming back on the stage, and when we leave the stage, they crave for us to come back.”

Aldianna was clear a dame has to be “loud, brash and in your face”.

They both said you don’t want “a shrinking violet”.

Flamboyance is called for – someone not only larger than life but also “silly” and “daft”, they agreed.

In an “Oh no it isn’t!” twist Lucie Goose, played by Dion Davies, in Mother Goose at the Courtyard in Hereford, said what a dame needed was star quality.

“You’ve got to have a good body, which I’ve clearly got,” he said. “You’ve got to have the face.

“Basically, the dame is there to talk to the audience, to get them all going, and hopefully give them a bit of fun, and also it gives the adults something different.

“The kids have a lot of different things to enjoy – all the colours, all the songs and stuff.

“But then the adults get the dame and there’s a few jokes in for them, then, which is always nice.”

All four dames are performing over Christmas and the new year. What could possibly go wrong?