‘I learned to sword fight in heels’: how Susie McKenna is rewriting the rules of Panto

With subversive scripts and a spotlight on local talent, this former principal boy is busy revolutionising pantomime – but there’s still room for bawdy gags

Few people have their spindle-pricked finger on the panto pulse like the writer-director Susie McKenna, whose festive formula has set the tone of theatre’s Christmas canon for decades. Within panto land, her name frequently attracts the prefix “legend”, and no wonder; a former principal boy (the panto’s young male protagonist role, traditionally given to a woman) who steered two decades of festive outings at the Hackney Empire in east London, in the process rerooting theatre’s once-commercial juggernauts in the local community. There she staged fairytale reimaginings of everything from Puss in Boots to Mother Goose; in 2019, she retold Dick Whittington as a young Jamaican who boarded the Empire Windrush in search of his fortune in London.

This year, McKenna turns her attention – and her locally anchored, uplifting, politically witty scripts – south of the river, to Catford’s refurbished Broadway theatre, in the borough of Lewisham, south-east London, where a “modern remix” of Sleeping Beauty opens next month .

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