Image: Rob Forknall as Widow Twankey Image: Glen Harris www.southcoastproductions.com
Actor Rob Forknall is playing Widow Twankey in the Paul Hammond Productions version of Aladdin. Here he shares a day in his life in panto season…
I’ve been doing this for twenty years and now I get asked to play the role which is very nice. I’m in the fortunate position of getting the chance to direct as well. I’ll help Paul Hammond with ideas and he’ll pretty much leave me to my own devices. There’s a script so we’ll work on this with the other guys and I’ll spend time deciding what I’m going to do with dances and songs, for example.
My rehearsals usually happen on the last couple of days – we only really have a week to put it on. We learn our lines during the process, as we go along! For the dame, it’s fairly loose – there is script that you stick to but I’m allowed to improvise when it comes to performance if something happens. The dame is the anarchic part of the show. You can get away with so much more because you’re in a dress! You’re outrageous, anarchic and hilarious.
We rehearse in the theatre on stage. We are generally there at about 10am and we can go on until eight or nine at night depending on how well the day is going. It’s pretty intense.
I choose the frocks I’m going to wear for each role and the director will make the final decision so there might be some changing around. My frocks are made by a wonderful woman called Claire Southern who has done them for the last 15 years. We might buy a couple in. The bras are sewn into the dresses now so it helps to cut the time for changes. Some quick changes are less than 30 seconds and for this reason you can’t do dame by yourself – you have to have dressers! At Worthing the women who look after the kids are helping me to dress and they are just absolutely wonderful! They change me within seconds. It takes a couple of goes!
We opened on December 9th and will go on until January 2nd. We can do three shows a day and hence – no voice left! I was directing the Maidstone pantomime, got that up and running then came down to Worthing to start rehearsals. It’s a lot of talking without a break!
There’s a lot of shouting on stage because you’ve got 600 kids screaming at you and you end up screaming back and you forget that your voice is quite a delicate instrument. There’s other things on stage like the hazer which pumps out smoke and it dries your voice out. It’s tough on your voice.
I’ll get to the theatre about an hour before the show, then do my own makeup which takes about 40 minutes. I have these enormous eyelashes which you really can see at the back of the theatre. I was doing a show in Weymouth and was wearing a wig made of orange wool and a bit of thread got into my eyelash then hit my eye and I was suddenly in enormous pain in my eye and couldn’t do anything about it. That wasn’t pleasant!
Pantomime is one of the most exhausting forms of theatre – you’re doing two/three shows with half an hour between the first and second, then an hour between the other. It’s relentless. You’re hungry, you can pick up bugs!
If the audience is up for playing, you can tell before the curtain goes up, you can feel the energy. But ultimately, you have so much fun.