Joy at the Tron Christmas Panto

Growing up in Glasgow, Tron pantomime was my family panto of choice. Pantomime productions can be a massive cringe or indeed wildly offensive, but the Tron tend to spend the money on commissioning good writing rather than casting, I dunno, Les Dennis. The shows always hit the agreed beats (he’s behind you, sweets chucked at the audience etc) and it became my tween birthday party outing of choice, just around that point when we were maybe a bit too old to go to the panto but still wanted to go to the panto.

In 2022, it was one of the first theatre shows I went to post-lockdown. It had been postponed… twice? Three times? We went to the last matinee of the run, and the wheels were well and truly coming off what I assume had previously been a tight production. The runtime went over by half an hour, an hour, as writer / visionary / Scotland’s reigning dame Johnny McKnight adlibbed to the audience, revelling in the joy of being on stage after such a long time of waiting. He really had it in for one woman who’d come in late, and returned to needling her repeatedly throughout the show. I passed her in the lobby and laughed in her face, before immediately apologising because why am I mocking a total stranger? It’s OK, she sighed, I deserved it. I overheard her in the bar saying she was late because the ceiling in her kitchen had collapsed.

One of the things I loved most about the show was how deeply rooted in Glasgow it was. As someone who lives in Edinburgh and feels a low level sense of shame about that, it felt incredibly joyful to be back immersed in the words, cultural references and petty beefs of the city I grew up in. I didn’t consider how idiosyncratic the specific prejudices against specific areas of the city were until I saw my (east coast born) husband and child being completely baffled by why I was weeping with laughter at someone shit talking Kelvinside. Sad for them.

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Peter Panto and the Incredible Stinkerbell, Tron Theatre, 22 Nov-5 Jan