Panto has the power to save theatre, says best dame in the business Clive Rowe

‘Everybody has a dame in them,’ says Clive Rowe. The star has just retired to his dressing room after another hectic Hackney Empire panto, a tradition, which since the late 1990s has usually featured Clive’s Olivier-nominated dame.

For many, Clive’s dame is the best in the panto business. This year it is Mother Goose, the performer’s directorial debut. MG owns a beauty parlour, hence her frock, which Clive has yet to remove, or more like, deconstruct.

A tiered cake of a dress, each layer is a giant pot of beauty cream inspired by a global brand such as “Esteé Lord It”.

Two conical swirls of whipped beauty cream jut out from the chest area like those on Madonna’s famous Jean Paul Gaultier bodice. Only Mother Goose’s make Madonna’s look as banal as traffic cones.

The dress is impossible to sit down in so Clive patiently stands as Metro’s photographer, Daniel, does his thing. ‘We all only have to pursue the dame within us to find her,’ continues Clive with such conviction my inhibitions fall away.

This, then, is how, for Showtime’s tireless search for the inside story on our finest productions – for which I have clung to Glinda’s bubble as it soared across Wicked’s stage – I hear myself asking, ‘Could even I now be a dame?’

A frock is taken from a nearby rail. I soon feel the least pretty in pink that it is possible to be. Hoping for tips I ask Clive what are the qualities needed to be a dame, pathetically followed by, and do I have them? Clive lets out a roar of laughter which might just be a diversionary tactic.

‘The first quality you’ve got to have is not to show fear,’ says Clive. Ah. ‘The audience can smell it,’ he continues.

‘Nobody taught me how to be a dame. I just watched people. I’ve seen dames in boots and beards that made me cry with laughter. And that’s what I try to be. Funny.’

Yet Clive has more than funny in his armoury. Few of east London’s boys and girls, hundreds of thousands of whom it is estimated have watched his 15 pantos, will know that the man beneath the costume is one of the finest musical theatre talents in the country.

Of course, all pantos have music. But only Hackney’s has Clive’s voice, which raises the Empire’s roof as high as it has elevated the many major productions in which Clive has starred – from Sondheim’s Company to the National Theatre’s 1996 revival of Guys And Dolls in which Clive’s Nicely Nicely rocked the stalls with Sit Down You’re Rockin’, a performance for which he won an Olivier Award.

‘It wasn’t like I was out there on my own,’ he says modestly. ‘I was working with amazing actors; Henry Goodman, [The Wire’s] Clarke Peters and [The Crown’s] Imelda Staunton. I was with the crème de la crème,’ says Clive, which brings us back to his costume and mine.

I catch myself in one of the dressing room mirrors and see looking back at me not a dame but a big flamingo. ‘Your photographer would make a good dame,’ says Clive, slightly crushingly.

‘Nothing’s forever but I can’t imagine a time without panto’

Hackney Empire is 120-years-old. Yet although many a crisis has been negotiated by this magnificent Edwardian venue over the years, today’s sight of 1,000 schoolchildren taking their seats is a sure sign that panto has the power to save theatre, suggests Clive as he watches his audience from the wings.

‘That’s families and that’s parents saying, “Yes, we want our children to experience this,” he adds.

‘People are going through incredible problems at the moment,’ continues Clive, ‘especially coming out of Covid and with the cost of living crisis. But panto has always been the saviour of theatre, recouping money theatres lose during the year. That’s not something new.’

As always, Clive is the dame. Standing nearby is his dresser, Myfanwy Holland, whose job is to help him in and out of ten fabulously architectural costumes. It is a process which charts another kind of change in which Clive’s Mother Goose morphs from caring matriarch to self-obsessed Insta influencer and back again, the morality lesson of this year’s show being that vanity is a vice.

‘In the evening performance you will literally see families from the age of two to 90-year-olds,’ says Clive.

Today the theatre is populated almost exclusively by schoolchildren marshalled by a few equally excited teachers.

One of them is Mr Jenkins of St Mary’s Primary in Hornsey. He doesn’t know it yet but Clive’s Mother Goose will soon call on him to help with one of the show’s slapstick scenes for which, to the delight of his pupils, it looks like Mr Jenkins will be splattered with gloop.

But all this happens later. Right now it is almost time for curtain up. ‘Goooood Afternooooon, Hackneeeey,’ says technical manager Othman Read from offstage. The response of the children is so piercing, adults cover their ears.

‘Nothing is forever,’ says Clive resplendent in an outfit festooned with cinema film and inspired by Hollywood.

After all, the show is set in Hackneywood. ‘But I can’t see a time without panto.’

Coffee, warm-ups, and dodging swords

It’s fair to say 11am is early morning for theatre folk. But because today is a matinee some of the cast of Mother Goose have gathered for a coffee to talk to Showtime about this year’s Hackney panto.

There is not much that is new on stage to dance captain Dawn Williams. But ‘there is a fight which I’ve never done before,’ she says. ‘We practise after warm-up every day so when we hit someone they duck in time, and when swords hit we know it’s coming.’ Who knew that being in Mother Goose was like training for Call Of Duty?

‘I also do acro for the first time,’ adds Dawn, a term which only becomes clear when she and fellow dancer Adam Tench tumble on to the stage like black-clad Siamese ninja twins. They play bailiffs to Tony Marshall’s Squire Purchase, landlord of Mother Goose’s beauty parlour which owes rent.

‘It’s my first panto and I am having a great time,’ says Tony who played Noel Garcia in Casualty for 12 years until his character died of Covid in the hospital drama in 2021. ‘But I’m not the real baddy. That’s Demon Queen,’ he says nodding to Rebecca Parker, who is yet to change from her Tai Dai tracksuit trousers into an all encompassing glittery black affair.

On stage it makes her look like a two-legged spider. ‘I’m very much in the faces of the children, breaking the fourth wall,’ says Rebecca.

‘My role is to terrify them,’ she adds with glee. Her Demon is the complete opposite of comedian Kat B’s character, people’s champion Billy Goose (son of Mother), a reluctant influencer exhausted by having to keep up with the expectations of his followers.

Though he doesn’t look it, Kat is the panto veteran of the cast having performed no less than 20 shows. He is also a member of Hackney’s Hall of Fame, a list which threads through the building and includes such greats as Harry Houdini and Louis Armstrong. ‘For me it’s like having an Olivier Award,’ says Kat with pride.

‘Whenever they say panto I know my name will be there. No one can take that away from me. If they do it’s a government thing,’ he jokes.

Mother Goose is at the Hackney Empire, London, until December 31, hackneyempire.co.uk

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