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Pantomime in ScotlandYour Other National Theatre

By Paul Maloney and Adrienne Scullion

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Published 31 December 2026

About this book

Explores pantomime’s development in Scotland from the 1850s to the twenty-first century

  • Explores the development of pantomime in Scotland in the context of the country’s distinctive popular theatre tradition – as the living link between Scotland’s older entertainment and music hall traditions and modern Scottish theatre
  • Uses oral history interviews to evoke pantomime’s special place in popular theatre going in Scotland in the inter- and post-war periods and up to the present day
  • Examines the pantomime-mad interwar period, when excerpts of performances were broadcast live from the stages of Glasgow theatres, which held world records for the longest pantomime runs and explores the development of modern pantomime traditions at the Citizens’, Tron and King’s Theatre Glasgow

Pantomime has a distinctive and vital place in Scotland’s cultural life. This book traces its development from the nation’s rich popular theatre and music hall traditions to become Scotland’s ‘other national theatre’.

The book examines the representations of Scottish identity in scripts, performing material, designs and iconography as well as the significance of pantomime in the development of a modern, popular and politically engaged Scottish theatre. It tells this story through unpublished playscripts and pantomime ‘books of words’, memoirs and related texts, as well as through archive photographs and specially recorded oral history interviews with audience members and pantomime performers.

Exploring this unique, popular form, from its barnstorming heyday through its ongoing influence on modern Scottish theatre, the book shows how pantomime came to play such a special role in Scottish popular culture.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Preface

1. Hail Caledonia!: unionism and national identity in Scottish pantomime stories, 1850-1880
2. The impact of music hall, 1880-1920
3. Golden age: ‘Wha's like us!’; or, the triumph of the vernacular
4. Pantomine’s imagined Scotlands: there’s no place like home
5. Pantomime’s imagined Scotlands: A Wish for Jamie
6. A living tradition
7. A changing industry
8. The past in the present: the continuity of Scottish pantomime in performance

Bibliography
Index

About the contributors

Paul Maloney

Paul Maloney is a theatre historian who was formerly Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow and at Queen’s University Belfast. He has written extensively about Scottish popular theatre and entertainment culture, and is the author of Scotland and the Music Hall, 1850-1914 (Manchester University Press, 2003) and The Britannia Panopticon Music Hall and Cosmopolitan Entertainment Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Most recently he has contributed chapters on Transatlantic Exchanges to Claire Cochrane, Trish Reid et al (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century British Theatre. Volume One: 1900-1950 (2024), and on Stages, Performers and Audiences in the late c19, and Popular Theatre to the new Oxford Handbook of Scottish Theatre (Randall Stevenson and Greg Walker eds., OUP, 2025).

Adrienne Scullion

Adrienne Scullion is Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the Open University. She was previously Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen’s University Belfast, and Dean of Research for the Arts and James Arnott Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow. As well as her research interest in Scottish theatre and drama from the eighteenth century to the present, she has written on theatre and drama for children and young people, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women playwrights, and cultural policy. Previous publications with Maloney include ‘But to our tale: Tam o’ Shanter on Stage’, in Ian Brown and Gerard Carruthers (eds.), Performing Robert Burns (EUP, 2021).