We Owe it Partly to Cats
HE Pantomime is, if you really analyse it, the most surrealist of entertainments. We boggle at a canvas depicting a torso with a wooden door in it showing the landscape through its opening, whereas on the stage we are quite prepared to accept a play in which a handsome Prince is really a girl and marries a female Princess; in which an elderly widow has the face and voice of a raucous male comedian; in which a horse parts company in the middle and reveals a human means of locomotion; in which a more-than-life-size cat
speaks in rhyming couplets, and demons and fatries are a necessary part of the scenery, mixed indiscriminately with performing seals and trick cyclists. Such is the Pantomime, as vividly described in the series The English Theatre, from 4YA, and we can all of us recognise the pattern, no matter what the story. Invented originally by one John Rich, an eccentric cat-lover who hated actors but happened to own a theatre, the Pantomime became the darling of the people's heart and a perennial box-office attraction. I can only endorse the view of the American in this production, who at his first Panto just didn’t get it; but who presently was applauding as loudly as anyone in the pit seats-and who declared that "You don’t have to understand it; all you have to do is join in!"
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19460628.2.30.6
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 366, 28 June 1946, Page 15
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236We Owe it Partly to Cats New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 366, 28 June 1946, Page 15
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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