David Lister: The Week in Arts

Your career isn't behind you if you're in panto

Pantomime has changed for ever. Oh, no it hasn't. Oh, yes it has. (I thought I'd get that little exchange in before anyone else did.) Sir Ian McKellen started the change last year with his Widow Twankey at the Old Vic, to the joy of the headline writers who were able to make a knight a dame. As Sir Ian repeats it this year, more actors unfamiliar with panto are taking the plunge. Simon Callow plays Abanazer in another Aladdin at Richmond; Richard Wilson is Baron Hardup in Cinderella at Wimbledon; Frances Barber, an Olivier award-winning National Theatre player, is in the Old Vic production of Aladdin with Sir Ian.

Yes, you can still find Linda Lusardi and assorted faces from TV soaps up and down the country, but classical actors have discovered the joys of pantomime - and a way of getting some extra cash over the Christmas season - and I suspect the move from Shakespeare to Mother Goose will become a stampede next year.

Their slightly pompous explanations and justifications make one a cringe a little. "I always said I would never do panto, but I was persuaded it might be a good thing," says Richard Wilson. One envisages hordes of children desperate to "persuade" him. Worse in the "I don't believe it!" stakes is the statement by John Rhys Davies who played Gimli the dwarf in The Lord of the Rings, that this was an attempt to "turn it [panto] around and raise the stakes".

Consider them risen, even if I suspect that Sir Ian McKellen was trying a little too hard when he said: "I believe there's more pure theatre in pantomime than you get in Shakespeare." But all the classical actors seem to be having fun, though none as much as Sir Ian, of course, with costume changes from Abba jumpsuit to shimmering Marlene Dietrich evening gown. The production was a delight, and his performance a joy to watch. There was just one moment on the evening that I attended the Old Vic's Aladdin that made me question the classical acting approach to panto.

The excellent Frances Barber was doing her bit on stage as Dim Sum when there was a glitch in the hydraulics following a scene change, and a man in evening dress came on to pause the show for a few minutes. Miss Barber muttered "I'm afraid I don't know any jokes" and left the stage.

In my mind's eye I saw around me the giants of pantomime past and present, from Max Wall to Julian Clary. I felt I heard them booing and hissing. Don't know any jokes! Surely being left alone on stage to ad lib and make the children squeal with laughter is what every panto star dreams of. But classical actors don't ad lib. It doesn't go with their territory. Nor have they trod the boards in variety for years building up a collection of jokes.

And that's where panto and the finest classical actors can come unstuck. This is a world of spontaneity, ad libbing and a mental joke book that the late Bob Monkhouse would envy. I actually delight in the fact that some of our best and most experienced stage actors are embracing pantomime. It's a refreshing change after years of C-list celebs. And it means that secret panto fans like myself, without children under the age of 10 to lend respectability, can go to "study" how the conventions of pantomime are changing and how Sir Ian McKellen is developing the stagecraft of the art form. At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

So let's see plenty more RSC stalwarts next year, but only on certain conditions. Pantomime producers must give all classical newcomers a crash course in ad-libbing and every cast member must be supplied with a joke book.

Renaissance man

The rap star 50 Cent continues to dominate the hip-hop scene. His 2003 debut album Get Rich or Die Tryin' was the biggest selling debut ever, and his latest album tops the Billboard chart for the biggest seller in America in 2005. His life story has been turned into a film, out in the UK next month. As his mother was murdered when he was eight, and he was selling crack by the age of 12, and has been shot nine times, there won't be many pauses in which to replenish the popcorn.

In an interview this week, 50 Cent discussed the forthcoming film and his autobiography and his new controversially violent video game and his line of designer clothes and his line of designer sneakers and the artists he is signing to his record company.

"What people aren't used to," he says, "is having an artist with enough business savvy to create these ventures for themselves. Normally, you get people who are so creative that all they can do is create."

But that's so last year.

* One of the best pieces of news in the arts this year was the opening earlier this month of the £13m purpose-built Unicorn Theatre for children near Tower Bridge in London. I would have thought that the Government would be keen to cheer its success, so I was surprised when the Unicorn's artistic director Tony Graham revealed that not a single minister came to the opening.

Mr Graham said: "We asked every government minister we could think of. Not one replied - not Tessa Jowell [the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport], not David Lammy [the arts minister], no one from the Department for Education and Skills. It's as though theatre is just off the New Labour agenda."

That not a single minister attended shows a depressing lack of interest in a key arts initiative and in theatre. That not a single minister bothered to reply shows something worse - rudeness.