He'll always be behind you

NUMBER Two Dressing Room, the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford: my home for nigh on a quarter of every year.

- Kit Hesketh-Harvey

In the dying days of 2017, it’s full of the debris of Christmas: half-eaten boxes of crystallised ginger, a perishing poinsettia, scented candles as exhausted as we are.

It is here, after the evening pantomime has come down, that the principals have been summoned by a sombre management. I am wearing an 8ft rat’s tail made of latex. Over the relay can be heard the hubbub of a still departing, still-delighted audience. The remainder of the company, in their sequinned walk-down costumes, are heading back to the stage, to be told in their turn the news that is broken privately to us: news at which Idle Jack, in his motley and bells, lets out a howl that can be heard across the river.

Theatre is, perhaps, the only real democracy. Backstage, not only are we oblivious to differences of class, race, gender, belief, sexuality, age or weight, but those differences are valued and, to a casting producer, valuable. Pantoland, especially, is a Utopia, a cocoon of unreality: Oh, the hokey cokey! and who can sing the loudest. In the twice-daily tinsel and dry ice, there’s no place for aggressive tumours, shattering announcements and unexpected deaths.