The enduring magic of panto: 38 years of Christmas at the Joburg Theatre

For the first time since childhood, I returned to the Joburg Theatre where, every year families, schoolchildren and theatre lovers alike gather to watch a production that has become an annual Johannesburg Christmas tradition. This year is no exception. The pantomime has become a flagship event at the theatre where, this year, it’s celebrating its 38th anniversary with a production of Pinocchio. As I enter the theatre, I watch parents buy snacks and herd excited children into seats, reliving the days when one of those children was me.

The production feels intensely familiar, offering high-energy, heartfelt storytelling that infuses contemporary music and jokes winking at current affairs into the traditional beats of a classic fairytale. While watching this year’s Pinocchio, I immediately recognised familiar panto features I grew up with, such as the communal sing-a-long, which encourages the audience to stand up and perform a very silly dance to an equally silly song.

This marriage of old and new is everywhere: the script is peppered with contemporary references, from the Blue Fairy referencing controversial businessman Vusimuzi “Cat” Matlala, to cast members singing pop songs ranging from Michael Jackson to K-Pop, and even using Gen Alpha slang like “six seven”. I’m not entirely sure what that reference means and I imagine most adults in the room aren’t either, but it gets the kids going, and in many ways that’s the point. The young audience plays a starring role, eagerly yelling “he’s behind you” and booing villains, while characters further engage the first rows by squirting water guns or throwing out sweets. Even the staging has been updated; new LED screens give the sets a dramatically larger sense of scale and magic.

Pantomime is a type of exaggerated, comedic theatre with roots as far back as the Roman Empire. They emerged in England in the Middle Ages as family-friendly Christmas-season outings. Their emergence in Johannesburg is largely thanks to the visionary behind the annual plays.

The visionary behind the pantos

Wearing a baby-blue shirt and coral necklace that matches her sparkling eyes, South Africa’s Panto Queen, Janice Honeyman, tells me the annual pantomime pushes her to challenge herself. “I would hate it if I didn’t have to do it,” she explains. “One thing that does happen is that I can quite honestly say that each one I’m doing is the best one at the time. And I love doing it, and if I didn’t love doing it, they wouldn’t be great.”

Read more: Adventures in Pantoland – the perfect antidote to a very rough year

Honeyman began her theatrical career as an actress. She was born and educated in Cape Town but began her career acting and writing plays in Makhanda (then Grahamstown) at the beginning of what would grow into the annual National Arts Festival. There she met the late theatre legends Barney Simon and Mannie Manim, who established the Market Theatre and signed on Honeyman as one of the theatre’s first members. Manim later signed her onto a three-year acting contract, allowing her to work as an actress and get her directorial start. This was the setting in which she turned her attention to children’s theatre.

“I believe that throughout my adult years, for a very long time, the education system was really bad,” Honeyman explains. “You know, it was closed. It was very prescriptive. And I don’t think that it gave children a real opportunity to use their imaginations. So that’s why I just value being able to use my sort of children’s theatre skills and educational skills in stimulating children’s imaginations and thought processes, making them think for themselves.”

It was Lynette Marais, the director of the National Arts Festival from 1989 to 2008, who introduced her to the world of pantomimes and asked her to write one.

After doing some research in 1987, Honeyman wrote and directed her first, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, at the historic Alexander Theatre in Braamfontein. Her early pantomimes featured actors who would go on to become titans in South African film and television, including Seputla Sebogodi, Michael Richard and Graham Hopkins.

“And the first year we did it, people couldn’t believe it. And by the second year the newspapers were saying, and now we have the tradition of panto in Johannesburg,” she says.

The pantomime grew bigger, moving to the Civic Theatre (now Joburg Theatre) in 1997 with an adaptation of Robin’s A Cruise-Ou. Each year, Honeyman challenged herself to do something different.

As I grew older and watched the pantomimes with my younger siblings, I began to notice and understand the double entendres and cheeky, political jokes clearly intended for the adults in the room. I asked Honeyman how she walked the line between risqué and inappropriate for the kids in the room. Her answer is “parallel directing”.

“You try and do two things at once,” she explains. “So while it’s often at those moments fairly slapstick comedy, the naughty lines happen more or less at the same time. So while the kids are laughing at one thing, the adults are laughing at another.”

Launching local careers

The annual pantomimes have launched the careers of local actors. One of them is former Idols contestant Bongi Archie, whose acting career began when he was scouted for the pantomime in 2011. This year marks his ninth pantomime appearance, where he has a starring role as Pinocchio’s toymaker father, Geppetto Spoletto.

I met with him in his dressing room backstage, where he told me that his first panto was his first time coming into the theatre. “Growing up in Tembisa, we weren’t exposed to such things. I had to go back and study this thing and check out what pantomime is. I saw the shows that we have to do, I saw the challenge that brought me in. And yeah, we came here, got on stage, and then from there on, fell in love with pantomime,” he said.

Since his debut he has appeared in other musical stage productions including Saturday Night Fever, Starlight Express, and Monty Python’s Spamalot. But working with Honeyman has consistently challenged Archie the most, drawing him out of his comfort zone, and this artistic growth is what draws him back each year.

“It helps me be a better performer outside of theatre. It just helps me to engage with the crowd and be really a great performer on stage... and working with Janice and Joburg Theatre as a whole, for me it’s like I’m family now; so yeah, that’s why I come back,” he said.

All around me were audience members, from young children to elderly couples who keep coming back as well. At the curtain call, it’s easy to see why. The energy of the actors and children is so infectious that I find myself transported by it, and for the duration of the show I feel like a child again. DM

Pinocchio is running at the Joburg Theatre until 24 December 2025.