Sir Ian McKellen brings starry panto treat to Chichester

Anna-Jane Casey, who will be playing Cilla The Goose in Mother Goose at Chichester Festival Theatre from February 7-11, explains: “Ian McKellen is the loveliest man in show business. I used to think that that was Eddie Redmayne but now I'm afraid ‘Move over Eddie! It’s Sir Ian!’

"But Sir Ian remembers when he was younger that the pantos would go on until Easter. You would see people like Danny La Rue or Des O’Connor. They would start at the London Palladium and then they would travel all over the country to all sorts of places, to Manchester, to Liverpool, to Birmingham and they would tour until Easter. Ian McKellen said that he wanted to do that.

“And I can remember seeing Danny LaRue when panto came to Manchester and it would have been something like February. I think a lot of pantos became very much seen as Christmas business with the snow on the stage and so on and if you saw Val Doonican on stage as an elf in February that would just seem wrong. But Mother Goose is not a Christmas show. It is a show about a woman who is torn, a woman who's given the chance of fame and fortune and does she take it.

“Chichester is our first date on tour and then we tour through until April 16. I have done panto before. I did it in 2010 or 2011 or around then when my little one, who is now 16, was three. I was Aladdin at the Hackney Empire and it was great. And it's lovely to be doing it now. We have got John Bishop in the cast and that man is an absolute soul of pure gold. He is one of the nicest men that you could ever meet. We've also got great choreography. We got a great cast. We've got a great story. It is proper old school and absolutely something that everyone could enjoy. There is a bit towards the end where John Bishop does the song sheet moment and usually you have to say to everyone ‘Get up on your feet!’ but when we were in Brighton everyone was already up on their feet by then. It was a fantastic response and people were loving it.”

So maybe the production might now liberate panto from that total Christmas link: “It really doesn't have to be just a Christmas thing. It really could be something that you could keep going till Easter.” But whatever happens it is fantastic to be working with Sir Ian: “I watched The X Men with my children and there he was and then of course he's Gandalf and he was Macbeth and he was Lear. He's such an amazing actor but he is also incredibly funny. He's a bloke in a dress and a thick padded bra and that’s really funny to start with but he is just so funny on top of that. I spend so much of my time just laughing at him. I said to him ‘How does a lad from Bolton become one of our leading actors?’ I said ‘You must have gone to RADA?’ but he said no, he never trained. He just learned on the job. That's the best thing.

"You learn from experience. You get that human experience. He is not a lady but he plays a woman beautifully. I told him that he walks just like my nana and he said ‘Oh, is she still with us?’ and I said ‘No, she is very dead but you absolutely embody the spirit of her!’”