Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/922844
maltatoday SUNDAY 7 JANUARY 2018 Interview 15 An hour before stepping onto the Manoel stage as the Dame in Masquerade's 'Alice in Wonderland', actor/writer MALCOLM GALEA talks about the two loves of his life: Panto, and stand-up comedy (the more heckling, the better) stimulated and entertained. Does this affect their ability to enjoy something as traditional as the Christmas panto? It definitely does, yes. It really makes writers and producers up their game. Not just with children: with everyone. Everyone now has an attention span which is meas- ured in seconds. Even a promo vid- eo online: if people see that's more than a minute long, they won't watch it. No one has more than a minute to spare. If it's less than a minute... then maybe they'll 'risk it'. And if people have a two-min- ute break, they want to be enter- tained for those minutes. So they'll watch a short clip on Youtube. It's the same with Panto. They used to say 'a laugh a minute'. Now, 'a laugh a minute' is dull. Sixty sec- onds per laugh? No. It has to be a laugh every two or three lines. You need to really keep it up there: you have to be ruthless with your ma- terial, to ensure that your audience doesn't get bored. The advantage with Panto is that you can con- stantly 'check in' with the audi- ence: you can ask them, get them to boo, get them to shout, get them to do things... at all times, you need to assume that the audience does not want to watch. You can't ex- pect that, just because they bought a ticket, they're going to just sit there and enjoy the show. That's the one thing you cannot take for granted. With that in mind: you start with a plot that's going to in- trigue people, that's going to make them actually care what's going to happen to the characters... and something I particularly like about Panto is that you can break the 'fourth wall'. The actors know they're actors. And they know that the audience knows they're actors, too. So sometimes they make references to typical Panto tropes, like: 'We can't stop and rest, because we're in a Panto... and whenever the good guys stop and rest, the bad guys ALWAYS catch up with them'... I myself, as Dame, sometimes pick on an audi- ence member to help my character deal with what's going on. I ask the audience what's happening... then I can't understand them because they all speak at once, so I pick on one guy in the audience: 'OK, what's your name? When I have an issue, I'll ask you...' And he be- comes the hero of the show, and so on... Watching the show as an adult, I can't help but notice that when it comes to 'calling up people on stage'... the children will all be rushing to queue up, while the grown-ups will be sinking into their seats and trying to look as inconspicuous as possible (me among them, naturally). Out of curiosity: has anything ever gone horribly wrong when calling out audience members? [Pause]I would say, 'not yet'. In England, for instance, they don't take kids up on stage anymore, for health and safety reasons. They won't even let you use the back- stage toilets, because they're not insured. In Malta, we still do these things because no one's got hurt... yet. Even so, however, things have changed in this respect, too. This year, when the children come in, they're given a ticket... like at a cheese counter... and we call out six ticket numbers. It's much more civilised now. As for the adults, that's a different story. I guess eve- ry Dame has her own way of doing it – or any actor, because it doesn't have to be the Dame... but you tend to generally become a good onstage judge of character after a while. When they look like they re- ally, really, REALLY don't want to do it, I won't pick them. The audi- ence wouldn't want that anyway. If they look really, really cocky... I won't pick them either, because they'll try to be [laughs] 'funny'. It's a bit of a happy middle ground you're looking for: someone who doesn't altogether avoid your eye, but doesn't stare too intently ei- ther. Personally, my own preferred medium is stand-up comedy; I do that a lot. That makes Panto feel really easy... Stand-up comedy, on other hand, is notoriously difficult. I've been to gigs in the UK, where the heckling would have broken even Rodney Dangerfield. So I imagine part of being a successful stand-up comic must also involve acquiring a very thick skin... Maybe it's because I've been on stage for so long, but when here's something like that going on, I ac- tually get a rush. I enjoy it when the audience gets a bit feisty, and starts to bite back... I really like that. And I've done Edinburgh, with rooms full of drunken Glaswegians. Once you can handle that, then the mummies and daddies at the Ma- noel Theatre start looking slightly easier to deal with. With stand-up comedy, though, you have a lot of material that you've built up over the years... but when you go on stage, you don't have a script. You don't go out with jokes ready: you just talk to people, and, depending what they are... OK, there are peo- ple with kids? So I talk about my children. There are people who are going to get married? OK, let me tell you this story... sometimes you go completely off-tangent, and just improvise with the audience. Be- cause you know in your head that you have all these stories ready, should you need them. You have several safety nets you can fall back on. So when it comes to Panto: there are scripted parts, yes, that get tampered with all the time... but until those lines come along, I just play around. Those are the parts I enjoy the most. h wall