Johnny McKnight on his fabulous one-dame Edinburgh Fringe show She's Behind You
Christmas comes early as Johnny McKnight explores the history and cultural significance of the classic Scottish panto dame in his uproarious show at the Fringe. By David Pollock
“I love panto in Scotland, because I think it's different to panto anywhere else,” says actor and writer Johnny McKnight, who’s carved a successful career as one of Scotland’s most outrageous and effective pantomime dames through his work at Glasgow’s Tron Theatre and Stirling’s Macrobert Arts Centre.
“Here an actor can be in Medea for the National Theatre, then a month later be on stage at the Macrobert as the Silly Billy, and there’s no stigma attached. Panto is theatre for families, it's telling a story, it needs to be well-acted. Music hall’s our Shakespeare, it’s what our theatre’s built on, so we take it seriously.”
McKnight puts that seriousness to the test this Fringe with She’s Behind You, a one-dame show played in character as his outrageous drag creation Dorothy Blawna-Gale. An hour of late-night comedy in the panto tradition, albeit taking the genre out of its traditional pre-Christmas environment, it’s also a subversive storytelling dissection of the genre, McKnight’s relationship with it and the very nature of theatre as an evolving mirror of the times.
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She’s Behind You began life as the second of the Cameron Lectures at the University of Glasgow’s Bute Hall in February 2024, with McKnight following in the footsteps of inaugural speaker Alan Cumming. These lectures were founded by John Tiffany, director of apex Fringe hit Black Watch and the West End’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, in honour of his late former lecturer Alasdair Cameron, under whom Tiffany studied Theatre and Classics at the University in the early 1990s.
“Johnny let loose on a merry festival audience at the Traverse is going to be something to behold,” says Tiffany, who also directs She’s Behind You (like Black Watch, it’s produced with the National Theatre of Scotland). “The whole point about these lectures is that they're not really lectures, they’re performance art. I knew Johnny’s would be hilarious, but it was also raw, honest, heartbreaking and incredibly life-affirming. He managed to articulate the bare bones of what pantomime is, that it's political, it's subversive, it's anarchic and it can be a real force for good.”
From detailing his biggest influences in pantomime, including Johnny Beattie, Janette ‘Jimmy Krankie’ Tough and Elaine C Smith, that lecture became about so much more than just a history of pantomime. “I was thinking about the difference in what panto looks like in the 20 years I’ve been doing it, in terms of gender makeup, cultural appropriation, in terms of how the world's changed and moved forward, or in some places hasn’t,” says McKnight.
“When I first started we were still doing Aladdin dressed up like we were Chinese people, and that's not entirely banished. It was 90% men onstage, with one woman who never got a punchline, she was just there to look pretty for the dads. Yet there’s always a new generation that fights against that and does even more unexpected, brilliant, push-it-forward stuff. It keeps changing, that’s why panto’s survived so long.”
As well as digging into the medium, She’s Behind You is McKnight’s personal journey. “It’s about what I've discovered about being a man by being a panto dame, and what I'm still trying to figure out about the world through doing it,” he says. “I'd only just come out when I started being a dame, so there’s me in a dress talking about being a mother, and actually I was still trying to find myself sexually.”
The lecture went down a storm. Once word got round, McKnight was invited to give a repeat performance at Glasgow’s Pavilion Theatre earlier this year. “I'd never stood on the Pavilion stage before, that was a dream come true,” he says. “I just wanted to know what it was like, because when you're talking about panto there's so much that's connected to the Pavilion. ‘Janette Krankie Beanstalk Horror’, I’ve a poster of that headline from the Daily Record in my office looking down at me while I work.”
Everyone who was at the Pavilion that Sunday afternoon raved about it, and now She’s Behind You has arrived in Edinburgh, where the fast-talking, Scots-accented McKnight promises to “pronounce those Ts and Ds” for an international audience, but absolutely not water down the comedy or dumb down the message.
Who knows where it will go after this? “I came off stage at the Pavilion and felt I was ready to die in an aircraft accident, it was like a retirement party or a farewell tour,” laughs McKnight. “But it turns out it’s Cher’s farewell tour and it lasts about 20 years.”
She’s Behind You is at the Traverse Theatre, various times, until 24 August
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