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[title]As the city awoke following its first lockdown in 2020, with Sydney’s theatres finally given the go ahead to reopen in late September, the first productions to return to the stage were notably austere – necessarily so, given the economic impacts of an unprecedented months-long shutdown. At the time, seeing actors in the flesh doing anything at all was a heartening signal that some sort of normality was returning, but after such a prolonged period of emotional heave-ho, the first shows on offer were somewhat lacking in feel-good factor. This has been far from the case with Sydney’s second theatrical renaissance. The first production to tread the boards at Surry Hills’ Belvoir St Theatre following an even more gruelling hiatus, is exactly the kind of all-singing, all-dancing, solid-gold pick-me-up Sydney so desperately needs right now.
But this is more by serendipity than by design. The Boomkak Panto – the brainchild of theatremaker, director, and all-out triple threat Virginia Gay – had always been destined to be the final show of Belvoir’s 2021 season. As fate would have it, it would also turn out to be a well earned reward for theatregoers, robbed of almost a quarter of their year. “It feels like an incredible piece of luck and timing, in a world where for the last two years, luck and timing has been against just about everybody,” Gay reflects.
Photograph: Daniel Boud
Christmas in Australia is a perplexing mix of Northern Hemisphere traditions and Southern Hemisphere weather – a place where frost-bitten Dickensian street urchins crowd window displays at David Jones while it's pushing 40 in the shade, and Santa wears a fur-lined hat and red boardies on the beach. However, somewhere on the 17,000km trek between Britain and the Land Down Under, one Yuletide staple, familiar to all in the UK, got lost along the way: the panto.
For those not already in the know, panto is a type of hammy, fairytale-centric, fun and frothy theatre that is both underpinned by centuries of am-dram tradition and yet heavily reliant on pop-culture savvy. Also sereniditously, Gay thinks that this campy and kitsch form of storytelling is perfectly tooled for an audience who have only just emerged from isolation. “In one way, panto is the very purest form of entertainment, because it's basically a variety act with very little plot, and just this celebration of joy and life. And one of the things that is really vital to that energy is that panto relies a lot on an audience. There's this conversation with the audience constantly. The show can't continue unless the audience screams ‘It’s behind you’, or whatever it is. So that seems particularly wonderful because live theatre cannot exist without an audience, which is something theatres haven’t been able to access for so many months.”
The world changes. And the stories that we tell, to reflect back to the world, have to change too
However, that’s not to say Boomkak is all sugar and no spice. Yes, you’ll be leaving the theatre with your brain swimming in serotonin, but audiences can also expect to get something of an education. Beyond the madcap clowning, pantos are, at their core, morality plays, championing a vision of good triumphing over bad. “I started with the question, ‘If I were to do a modern Australian pantomime, what would the fairy tale that I would want to tell be like?’” Gay shares. “It would be a story of an ideal of what Australia could be: seen and heard Indigenous elders; a beautifully integrated and vital refugee community; gender identities and self-expression celebrated instead of attacked. That is an Australian fairy tale – that is what an Australian panto should be.”
But Boomkak is more than just a panto (“Oh no it isn't.” Oh yes it is). This meta-theatrical show – which explores how a country town in rural Australia deals with a corporation when it comes to bulldoze homes to make way for another soulless urban utopia – mines a more meaningful subtext. It reveals the complexities of a multicultural community that has turned to art as an act of soul-lifting defiance.
“Every single transition of power in the panto is about women and minorities and gender nonconforming people stepping into positions of power, either because of the power vacuum, or because the terrible, big developer in a suit has has done something malevolent and is unfit to lead,” Gay says. “We're modelling how the world should be. We’re showing women and minorities and gender-nonconforming and gender-fluid people in positions of power. This is what it looks like and this is why we need it.”
Photograph: Daniel Boud
Another must-have ingredient of the panto is song, so Gay turned to long-time collaborator and friend Eddie Perfect to pen the music for Boomkak. “He was the first and only person on my list, because I knew that this show would be filled, as pantos are, with completely insane pop songs that were wedged in with absolutely no relevance to the plot. But it's also been a dream for the songs to be rethought by an incredible Iranian onstage musician, Hamed Sadeghi [alongside musical director Zara Stanton]. They’ve done such amazing work – in fact both of them just got nominated for Arias, that's how fucking good they are!”
Easily dismissed as a Christmas bauble, a panto could be deemed culture too low to say anything of worth. But taking a traditional vehicle, like the panto, and remaking it for now, is as essential to the state of the art as any piece of modern theatre, Gay believes. “The world changes. And the stories that we tell, to reflect back to the world, have to change too. Otherwise, we're constantly reinforcing old ideas, old imaginations of ourselves, old imaginations of social roles, gender roles, all of that stuff. So the stories have to change to reflect the world that we're living in, and also to encourage people to continue to change.”
And as much as Gay hopes the show reveals ideas that inspire its audience, Boomkak has been just as revelatory for the creatives who made it. “It’s about community. I think that is the thing that got us through the last two years – as a community, we all pitched the fuck in. We get behind each other. That's what we do. That's how we survive.”
The Boomkak Panto plays at Belvoir St Theatre until December 23, 2021. Read Time Out’s four-star review here and get your tickets here.