I suppose my warmest memories of the Grand are associated with the pantomimes that I would go and see each year as a child.
Before the show started, there was this red curtain and I’d be thinking ‘Oh my gosh this is going to be such a magical world, what am I going to be seeing’. Then the curtain would go up and there’d be all this colour and all these sparkly outfits and the scenery.
One or two of the pantomimes that I attended, I went with other children from a local factory. My father worked at the factory, so there’d be a pantomime trip for the children. It must have been that the employers, as a perk to their staff, would arrange a visit for the children to be picked up and taken to the pantomime. When we arrived, there’d be lots of people and we’d be told to sit in whatever row and I remember there’d be the ice cream in the interval.
I remember the warmth of the theatre and some of the earliest pantomimes that I saw were so special. I used to see those pantomimes, come home and then recreate them.
One summer I went to a local fete and I bought this book of pantomime stories. At the back of the book, instead of it being just the cover it was a model of a proscenium arch and the book also came with three scenes from the pantomime Cinderella. I put the model together with the scenes and I started playing with little stick characters that I drew representing the pantomime characters.
I would also write the pantomimes and the scripts, and by the time I was 14 I had over 300 characters including Dancing Girls, but only on sticks. However, in my mind, they’d be coming alive and my parents thought I’d never grow out of the little pantomime.
If that little boy who used to go to the pantomimes had been told in years to come, you’re going to direct a show on that stage, that little boy would never have believed it.
