Belvoir’s The Boomkak Panto is a joyous, subversive and Australian twist on the classic Christmas tradition

By Gabriella Edelstein, Lecturer in English, University of Newcastle

Review: The Boomkak Panto, directed by Richard Carroll and Virginia Gay, Belvoir

The great Victorian playwright George Bernard Shaw was not an admirer of pantomimes. He wrote in 1897 that this dramatic genre is “a glittering, noisy void”, which worries “the physical senses without any recreative appeal to the emotions and through them to the intellect”.

What value, then, can there be to a pantomime? As Virginia Gay and Richard Carroll’s exuberant The…

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