Stanley Baxter was a sprightly 80-year-old and still performing on radio for the BBC in 2006 when I visited him in his London home to reminisce about his days appearing in panto at Edinburgh’s King’s Theatre.
The Glaswegian’s first pantomime appearance in the Scottish Capital’s was at the Old Lady of Leven Street in 1951, the actor recalled. It was a production of Aladdin in which he was Wishee Washee to then legendary dame George Lacy’s Widow Twankey – although theirs was not always a particularly amicable working relationship.
As Baxter explained, “I was the newcomer back then, and in Edinburgh I was only really known from radio – but it didn’t take audiences long to adopt me. Really, that happened straight away with Aladdin which was very good for me. At the time everybody thought it was going to be George Lacy’s show because he was a very famous English dame who had played Drury Lane and everything. The theatre manager said to me, ‘I’m not sure if that Glasgow stuff of yours is going to go so well here. George Lacy’s stuff is magnificent. He’ll stop the show every time he goes on’.”
Laughing, he continued, “Well that’s not what happened. Every time I went on the audience went into hysterics and George Lacy got so angry that he covered the speaker in his dressing room so that he couldn’t hear the laughter.”
Baxter, who went on to appear in numerous King’s pantos, including much happier productions of Mother Goose with Scottish comic Jack Anthony, and Cinderella with Ronnie Corbett, didn’t work with Lacey again after that fateful show.
“He was impossible. He was getting on and he was very temperamental. Quite brilliant in many ways, but terribly jealous… I can see his point of view. Here he was doing all his famous stuff from London and it was only going all right, and all my stuff was going like a bomb because it was Scots, being played to a Scots audience”.’
If you’d like to read more about Stanley, The Real Stanley Baxter, an autobiography written with Brian Beacom, is available here.
I remember when the King’s Panto ran on to early spring. I attended the final Wednesday matinee of whatever show Stanley was starring in that year.
He was still giving 100%
They don’t make them like that anymore.