New Theatre Royal gets back in panto swing

Sheena Hulme, New Theatre Royal Portsmouth

This year is actually the third year of the new panto cycle at Portsmouth’s New Theatre Royal, but as operations director Sheena Hulme says, effectively – after the upheavals of the past couple of years – it feels like the first.

After offering Christmas shows for a while rather than pantos, the venue opted to go down the panto route – but the pandemic hasn’t given them the gentlest of starts. They’re hoping finally to get fully on track with Sleeping Beauty from December 9-December 31. The point is that it is crucial to the venue: “Any venue that does a pantomime will see it as the highlight of the calendar. For a lot of venues pantomime is their most productive event and it does mean for a lot of venues that they can put on the rest of the year because of the money they have made on the panto. But actually for us we are quite new to panto. This should be year three of the panto cycle for us but the first one was cancelled in 2020 and so 2020 became 2021 but then if you remember last year was when omicron arrived so there was still the continuing crisis so even though we are in our third year we are still sort of in the first. Last year we did well enough in terms of how we had been hoping to do bearing in mind everything that was going on, not just for us but for theatres everywhere. We would have done better if omicron hadn't turned up but everyone was in the same boat across the country. It definitely wasn't just us so really right now we are seeing this year as a massive building block in terms of success.

“We have got Jordan Productions and they have a very good reputation and they know their stuff. They rotate their pantos to other theatres and they know what works and what doesn't. So we know that we've got a very good product on the stage and we know that it's going to be great. Our previous CEO was a director and writer and he very much focused on Christmas shows and was wanting to do something different to the other venues in the area but then we decided that we should go for panto. We wanted to see if panto would bring lots of life into our venue at Christmas and provide a different production for our audiences. Throughout the year we put on a lot of different shows but this would be something very special.”

There will be plenty of people who will debate the rights and wrongs of Portsmouth having two pantos with the Kings nearby having a panto tradition going back decades: "But you've got to do what you think is right for your business and we are confident. We've come through a pandemic and now we're dealing with an economic crisis but it's not just a struggle at Christmas. It’s a struggle all the time and you've just got to find your way around. People will choose to come to see us and they will choose to see the Kings and then see which panto they like best. But I do think it's going to be a long time before the industry is back to normal. What it has shown us is that you just never know what is around the corner. You can never sit on your laurels. You've always got to be focused but I think that's always been the case in our industry anyway. You never know what's going to happen.”