1931-12-18 — Page 28

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CHINA MAIL CHRISTMAS SUPPLEMENT, 1931.

Behind The Scenes

How A Pantomime is Made

THE

THE most fascinating and also the most complete to the minutest detail. And while | laborious game I know,” said a famous I am superintending the whole of this work, I have long daily consultations with the London pantomime producer to the writer.designers of the thousands of costumes that "The man who produces a pantomime on a are required. big scale must live for it, and with it, almost night and day for a whole year. It is an incubus he can't escape from; but also a delight he would not miss, if, as it must be, his heart is in his work.

Expensive Tinsel.

"These costumes, I dare say you will be surprised to learn, may cost anything from £5,000 to £8,000 or more, in these expensive “Before the curtain goes up on Boxing days. I know it is a fairly general impres Night, I have already, decided on the nextion that the dresses which make such a feast and riot of colour on the pantomime stage are so much tinsel' of little intrinsic value. But I assure you__nothing can be farther from the truth. They are usually exceedingly costly-as expensive, in fact, as many worn in the most fashionable of West-End drawing-rooms.

year's production, which I try to make as

different as possible from this year's. Thus 'Aladdin' is followed by 'Cinderella" or "The Babes in the Wood, and 'Blue-Beard' by 'Mother Goose. And the next year's pantomime once fixed, I am constantly en- tering in my 'Suggestion-books,' of which I keep three always at hand, any ideas that occur to me from day to day.

"A single dress may cost anything from thirty to sixty guineas. I have known the "The subject fixed, I have a consulta-latter sum paid for more than one ball. dress exquisite confections such as 2 tion-usually on the evening after Boxing Day-with my co-author; and together we Duchess might be proud to wear, and be prepare a rough sketch of the plot, design-neath which are worn petticoats of silk and

at many guineas apiece. A picture ed to show our 'principals' to the best lace advantage. And it is no easy matter, I can dress may cost from twenty guineas up

wards; and a Court dress, as- much as a tell you, to evolve a score ΟΙ more new scenes from such an old story, for example, hundred pounds. as 'Cinderella,' and to evolve new lines of jokes for our stars. For the comic effects, luckily, we can rely on them to a largely : extent.

F

see, that pantomime 'tinsel' is expensive enough to satisfy the most exacting and fastidious.

"The designing of pantomime costumes is naturally very difficult and harassing work. Take, for example, a typical scene in which two hundred girls masquerade as sea-anemones, corals and shells. Here is a tough problem for the designer; for the two hundred dresses, of all the colours of the rainbow, must be so designed that, whatever the grouping, they shall present a perfectly harmonious picture!

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for the London

"It is no exaggeration to say that many thousands of hands are employed in pre- paring the costumes pantomimes alone. One scene in a Drury Lane pantomime kept 250 girls busy for many months; and over a hundred have been employed on two dozen dresses which were only seen for a few minutes daily in one pantomime.

“And while the scenes are being ar-

ranged and the costumes designed, import- ant work is going on in the 'property-room, where highly-skilled workers are busy making clay-models of the elaborate 'props' which play a prominent part in the pantomimes; and I have also to superintend the manufacture of the hundreds of shields, swords and so on that are required.

"When you consider that dainty shoes, stockings, and underwear are proportionate

costly it is easy to see how the money "Thus the months simply fly in tasks literally runs away. Even tights, when that crowd every hour of the long days- "When the plot is made out roughly made of silk, provide a formidable item for superintending and inspecting the busy ac the scenery scheme has to be fitted to it in the bill, when the cost of each pair is ex-tivities of hundreds of people, all putting consultation with our experts, who con-pressed in pounds, and two or three hundred the last ounce of energy and brains into the struct a miniature model of each scene, pairs have to be supplied. You can thus effort to make the pantomime a success."

CHRISTMAS FEASTS OF THE PAST.

Whatever our forefathers of past cen- turies missed, they certainly had no lack of tempting Christmas fare, or appetite for it.

Take, for example, the dinner to which Pepys sat down on Christmas Day, 1658, which consisted of "a dish of marrow-

bones, a leg of mutton, and a loin of veal; three pullets and a dozen larks, all in a great dish. Also a great tart, a neat's tongue, a dish of anchovies and prawns, and cheese."

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And what hungry Briton of to-day would not hail a Christmas pie like that provided for his guests in 1770 by a Sir Henry Grey? "It was," we read, "nine feet in circum- ference; weighed 165 lbs., and contained among other ingredients four geese, two turkeys, two rabbits, four wild-duck, two snipe, seven blackbirds, and half-a-dozen pigeons. This leviathan pie we are told, "was brought round at table

on a four-

wheeled truck specially constructed for the

purpose."

A few years earlier the Earl and Coun- tess of Northumberland gave a. Christmas supper, the principal feature of which was a colossal cake crowned by the presentment in sugar of a chaise and six horses, with coachman and footman, and Lady Yarmouth seated inside.

A Frenchman who visited England a -couple of centuries ago, waxes eloquent over his Christmas pie, which seems to have been in high favour as a Yuletide delicacy.

This delicious “nostrum,” as he calls it, was a "most learned mixture of neats' tongues,

THE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS.

E are going to see to it, this Christmas,

THE WRITING OF "THE CHIMES.”

Eighty years have passed since Dickens wrote at Genoa the last word of **The

W that we, even the busiest of us, are not Chimes," probably the most beautiful and

children.

too busy to inculcate this sense of the true meaning of Christmas into the We are going to find the Christmas story for them in St. Luke and give it to them to read as Christmas is approaching, giving them the opportunity to understand that it is the little child in the manger at Beth- centres and not the Santa Claus down at the department store, jolly and Christmassy as he may be. We are going to see that Christmas becomes for them primarily the time when thought must turn completely to others, and guide them to the understand- ing that where there is a maximum of giving and a minimum of receiving there is the really, truly, happy Christmas.

lehem about whom all this fuss and fervour

The full redemption of the real Christ- in such mas lies in the extent to which

ways as this, we can restore to the child of to-day- who will be the adult of to-morrow, that precious sense of giving to others

which has been sadly lost out of our more recent Christmasses.

HIS MAJESTY THE TURKEY: HOW HE

GOT HIS NAME,

In many country districts the turkey- cock is supposed to get his name from his curious call. Listen to him closely in the paddock and his cry bears some resemblance

chicken, eggs sugar, raisins, lemon and to a reiterated chirp of "Turk-turk-turk." orange-peel and various kinds of spicery." It is much more probable, however, that the And it had for rival, for many a generation, bird gets his name from the traders who plum broth, or plum porridge, a concoction | originally imported the bird from America. of "beef or mutton boiled with broth and These merchants were for the most part thickened with brown bread," to which, Mussulmen traders, or Turks, who traded in when the boiling was half completed, were the Levantine and Morocco ports and were added "raisins, currants, prunes, cloves, known amongst sea-farers in the Middle mace and ginger."

Ages as Turkey-merchants. According to

best-loved of his Christmas stories; hnd, as he put down his pen and looked down from his study-window on the waters of the Merditerranean, mirroring the blue Italian

sky, the tears began to stream down his cheeks. and. resting his head on his hands, he "sobbed like a child."

Some minutes later he took up his pen

again and wrote these words to his friend John Forster: "Half-past two, afternoon. Thank God! I have just finished The Chimes.' I take up my pen again only to say that much, and to add that I have had what women call a 'real good cry!'"

For weeks he had been writing at high pressure, “in a fever of inspiration." He had lived with and for his book; and as his pen flew over the sheets he had laughed and

cried with his characters, and "generally, as he confessed, "behaved like an idiot." And when at last he had to say goodbye to them it was as though he stood by the graveside of loved ones. "Day after day," he says, "I was in my bath at seven o'clock; and an hour later I was at my desk, blazing away, resolutely and red-hot, for seven or eight hours at a stretch until my hand refused to work any more.

"I had almost finished the story and, rack my brains as I would and did, I simply couldn't think of a title. Then, one morn- ing, as I sat down to my desk, the bells of Genoa broke, as if by one consent, into a merry, almost deafening peal; and I had it!

"The Chimes! The Chimes! That was the very title I wanted but could not find.

legend the first turkey Europe by Jean Cabot, just as the first was brought to tobacco and the first potato were brought to England by Drake and Hawkins.