Why are they talking ?
Pantomime is a curious entertainment - a form of ritual theatre staged around the winter solstice. Originally silent (a form of mime), it is now anything but, with extensive vocalisation from both the performers and the audience. The stories are generally well-known (drawn from popular folk-tales and similar sources), populated with stock characters, including a principle boy, generally played by a young lady with shapely legs, the heroine, also played by a young lady (which gives an added edge to the inevitable romance) and a dame, played by a man as an exaggeration of a middle-aged lady. Scripts change from year to year, but generally contain different strands of humour: visual, topical and corny.
The story of Aladdin comes from the Thousand-and-one Nights cycle. The original is set in China, but a very Arabian China (populated with the same genies and magicians that inhabit the rest of the tales). The pantomime has imported the Chinese setting, but in this case, it is a very English China - hence it is set in a Chinese laundry.
Puss in Boots is a common European folk-tale, complete with a ritual dual of magical beings - in this case the cat and the ogre. As with Aladdin, the original story has little or no role for the dame, nor is their any requirement for a pantomime donkey.
Cinderalla is probably the most familiar story, thanks to Charles Perrault's distillation of a variety of European rags-to-riches stories.
Dick Whittington is a true story - but only in as far as Richard Whittington really was mayor of London (co-opted for part of a term, and subsequently elected to the office three times) around the end of the fourteenth century. His claims to fame include a bequest to build the first public lavatory in London. The story about him coming to London penniless, with a cat as his only friend, began to circulate a century or two later, around the time of Shakespeare...
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves also comes from European tradition, but of course is best known through the Disney cartoon version. (The familiar dwarves' names are a Disney invention - there are early drafts of the Disney script with different sets of names.)
Sleeping Beauty is another Charles Perrault fairy tale.
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