The Good, the Bad, and The Three Musketeers

Pantomime is a very important part of theatre in the UK. For most people, it’s their first show, and it has a tremendous impact. A good pantomime experience can foster a lifetime's love for the theatre as a whole.

I remember the first pantomime I saw. It was at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, a production of Robinson Crusoe, starring Ken Dodd and his Diddymen. (Yes, I am that old.)

I don't remember how they managed to shoehorn a whole army of puppets from Knotty Ash into a story about a man marooned and alone on a desert island, but I do remember it was very funny, colourful, loud, and larger than life.

I've loved panto ever since.

But just as a good panto remains with you forever, a bad one stays in the memory, too. Years later, I took my teenaged sons to see a local pantomime. In my experience, amateur pantomimes are every bit as entertaining as professional productions, (sometimes better!) and I was looking forward to this show.

Wow!

It was unlike any family panto I’d ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot. I always go to at least one panto each year, and most years, I’ll watch three or four. They're funny, with slapstick, and quickfire jokes, adult characters behaving badly and being rude to each other, which the children love, and they include a few double-entendres that parents find funny.

There was nothing double about the entendres in this show. It went beyond smutty, straight to soft porn. Which would have been fine if it had been billed as an adult pantomime. (Yes, they exist.) But it wasn’t, and there were children as young as five in that audience.

After the interval, very few audience members returned. None of the children came back. My son said to me, “it is funny, but I keep thinking, I'm watching this with my mother!”

I knew exactly how he felt.

On the way home, he said, “Mum, have you ever tried writing a panto?”

Well, no. Up to that point, I hadn't. But I couldn't think of a good reason not to try, so I sat down and gave it a go.

It's not as easy as it sounds. My first couple of attempts went straight into the rubbish. They were derivative, unfunny, and formulaic. It took time and practice to learn the very specific craft of panto writing.

I quickly realised that most pantos relied on five stories. On any given Christmas, there are countless performances of Snow White, Aladdin, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, and Sleeping Beauty.

I also learned, there was some very stiff competition. There are excellent panto writers out there. If my pantos were going to be performed – and, after all, what’s a script for if it's not going to be performed? – I needed to be different.

So, I took a completely different story, one I hadn't seen given the panto treatment before.

And that's how The Three Musketeers was born.

The Three Musketeers is published by Lazy Bee Scripts. You can find out more, and read the script, here.

Three Musketeers poster is from the Bishop Perowne Theatre's production in 2017.