The ludicrous story of the demise of ‘a panto for grown-ups’ at the hands of prudish theatre officials and social media moaners after just one performance.
What better way to end 2023 than with a story that seems to sum up modern Britain? The tale of the ‘adult panto’ that was cancelled after one performance because it was ‘too adult’ seems to represent everything awful about this country’s purse-lipped moralising, where grown adults are shocked at the use of four-letter words.
OK, the demise of Bewdley and the Beast 3 at the Civic in Stourport was not entirely down to offensiveness – a host of technical issues ranging from too few seats to problems with the sound also caused complaints, perhaps more complaints that were received over the show’s content, though we may never know that for sure. Bosses at the Civic pulled the show after one performance, even though we might reasonably ask if the technical errors were not the fault of the venue rather than the promoters. We might also ask why the theatre management didn’t have some idea of the content of the show before the first performance – surely they would have had access to the script, the promotional material or even seen rehearsals? Nevertheless, the Civic stated that “due to the unprecedented number of complaints and requests for refunds that we have received in the last 12 hours” the show was immediately cancelled. This seems a bit unfair on the Bewdley Town Criers, the amateur group behind the show.
You have to wonder just what sort of person attends an adult panto. You certainly have to wonder who attends a show featuring characters like Mrs Chlamydia Palmer and Miss Connie Lingus and is then offended by innuendo such as characters saying “a count, count a country girl, living in my little world” or the word ‘feck’. The organisers claim that they have never actually used the words ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’, and I’ll go out on a limb and say that the show was probably lacking in nudity, sexual references or any other boundary-pushing language.
In this day and age, we can never discount the possibility that some people bought tickets for the show simply to find it offensive and make complaints about the content. Madness, I know, but it seems exactly the sort of thing that the finger-waggers of the modern age would do, especially over an ‘adults only’ version of something traditionally made for kids. Why the Civic thought that these complaints – which must have been a minority of the audience, at least in terms of the show’s content – were significant enough to cancel the final two shows is baffling. But we live in a world of social media whingers who are given far more importance than they deserve.
As with Roy Chubby Brown – someone else used to being banned by stuck-up theatre bosses – I find adult pantos to be something that I’m pained to defend. I hated panto as a kid and I can think of nothing more awful than a sniggeringly rude version of the format. But that’s just me. Each to their own and for the poor sods who had bought tickets for this show only to have their freedom of choice snatched away from them by a bunch of humourless officials who have presumably not watched any TV comedy for the last few decades seems outrageous.
Here’s to the hope – a vain one, I fear – that such idiocy goes into a decline in 2024.
DAVID FLINT
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