Happy 97th Birthday Stanley Baxter
An hour in the company of the Scottish King of panto proved a candid experience.
It’s Stanley Baxter’s 97th birthday today, so when better than to share my one experience of the Scottish panto legend. Baxter, who famously did very few interviews and had ignored my request to chat changed his mind when the late Evening News stalwart John Gibson put in a word for me. You can imagine my surprise when Baxter called me up to invite me down to visit him in London.
Which is how, in 2006, as the Edinburgh King's staged its 100th panto, I found myself marking the milestone by chatting with Baxter in his living room about his first pantomime appearance at the Old Lady of Leven Street. He was a sprightly 80-year-old when I met him in his Highgate home. Here’s an extract:
‘… the actor recalls that he made his Edinburgh panto debut in Aladdin in 1951, not as Dame, but as Wishee Washee to George Lacy's Widow Twankey - although theirs was not always a particularly amicable working relation-ship.
Baxter explains, "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, Baxter recalls, “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 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,” reflects Baxter.
“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”.’
I’m sure you must have been so delighted to have this “audience” with the wonderful Stanley Baxter, he was and is a great entertainer and it was a pleasure to see him as a great Dame in Panto. Your whole interview would have been worth every minute of your trip to London and thanks for sharing some of it.
Regards
Pamela