As rehearsals continue and the ramp up to Christmas begins in panto-land, I catch up with Morgan Brind, Derby’s award-winning pantomime dame and founder of Little Wolf Entertainment in Little Eaton, who have been responsible for the Derby Arena panto for seven years now.
Morgan Brind is known to many as the one who gets to wear high heels, comical costumes and wacky wigs.
But who is Morgan when the pantomime dame’s make-up is removed?
‘As a child I remember going to Derby Playhouse and their wonderful shows. I joined their youth theatre and loved panto. One day, I thought, I would like to be part of that.’
So, Morgan’s theatre calling was born and he ended up at Bristol Old Vic drama school. He went to various auditions in glamorous locations like Basildon and Slough and soon realised he wasn’t leading man material in the conventional sense: ‘I was like a shrunken Miriam Margoles!’
The panto penny probably dropped in only his second acting job with the prestigious ‘Lord Chamberlain’s Men’, a company of all-male actors for which William Shakespeare wrote during most of his career.
Morgan played Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, which is like an original panto Dame role. He realised no one was going to ask him to be Hamlet, so Dame was more likely to pay his bills.
Morgan and his now business partner, Alan Bowles, were cast in a panto in Slough. On day one, the director said ‘I don’t really want any jokes’, which Morgan knew as Dame was never going to work.
‘The panto was truly awful,’ he recalls. ‘The theatre lost money on it and closed!’
Morgan and Alan saw an opportunity to offer to do it the following Christmas on a shoestring budget.
‘We made it all for about £12.80’ Morgan jokes. But they literally did everything - including painting the sets during rehearsals and calling all the favours they could. The hard work paid off and the panto production duo were up and running.
Little Wolf’s first office was in Morgan’s parents’ home in Little Eaton, yet their first panto home was a bit of a commute.
‘We Googled where in the UK had a big population but no panto and discovered Berwick Upon Tweed’ he explains. So, there they went, and remained for five years.
Panto-land is a small world and word soon spread about their productions and theatres started approaching them, including Loughborough and, eventually, Derby.
Little Wolf now writes and produces five pantos each year, including at Tunbridge Wells, Solihull, Corby, Loughborough and Derby.
But of course it is his home ‘town’ of Derby where Morgan loves getting on stage.
We start the tour of Little Wolf HQ in Little Eaton, a far cry from his parent’s spare bedroom. This vast hanger of a building with a very distinct smell of grease paint is a hive of activity.
Morgan suddenly stops and warns me to move and utters the sentence you would only hear in panto-land: ‘Watch yourself as we are about to be run over by a giant jacuzzi!’
Morgan’s love of this whole military precision production starts to shine as he talks me through the process - from models and imaginings of the set to actually receiving it and storing it ready to be trucked to various theatres.
‘The key to panto sets is to look hand drawn,’ he tells me. ‘It’s part of the joy of panto. You’re stepping into your favourite childhood storybook.’
He’s so right!
The budget on costumes alone is phenomenal. He shows me a new costume that’s just been delivered while we’ve been talking and is labelled the ‘jousting horse’.
It’s like a Bernie Clifton style costume with the fake legs. But as ridiculous as these costumes are for comic effect, on close inspection the detail on each displays such skill and artistry, even down to the detail of the fake legs wearing diamanté encrusted fishnets!
Morgan reminisces about his drama department at Ecclesbourne School in Duffield and how wonderful they were in giving him access to the craft of painting sets and making everything needed for theatre productions.
But, as he remembers with less fondness, ‘it was a time when it wasn’t as accepted for boys to be so theatrical and was like having a target on my back!
‘The industry isn’t kind to you in the early stages particularly to “Miriams”,’ says Morgan. ‘I think those early years of being ridiculed and rejected by school peers toughened me up to rejection in the theatre industry.’
We arrive finally in the wardrobe department where I get a preview of two of this year’s Dame costumes.
One is a red post box and I question how he gets into it. It’s clear if someone pushes him over in it we will have a beached Dame on our hands!
The other costume is an actual skip. Morgan is now really warming into panto mode: ‘I’ve been called rubbish for years!’ (badum tish)
Being the pantomime Dame does have its drawbacks. Apparently, Morgan’s iPhone face recognition will not recognise him when he is fully made up as Dame! But the joys far outweigh the drawbacks.
‘The minute you walk on stage in a costume like that you break the ice and the audience laughs instantly’ explains Morgan, describing it as a form of therapy.
As we come to the end of the tour at the vast Little Wolf HQ, I talk to him about the Derby lad who has travelled around the UK with his panto productions, finally ending up with his home town calling him back to produce their panto at the Arena.
He replies that there’s an extra sense of wanting to do the best job he can for his home town.
‘You know your neighbours will be coming to watch and I bump into people who want to talk to me about how much they loved the panto and me as Dame. It really spurs you on.
‘This will be our seventh year in Derby and each year you get the privilege of seeing that loyal returning audience and you want to repay that loyalty.’
As most Voices of Derbyshire tell me, the outdoor therapy that Derbyshire provides, for Morgan and his dog, is a magic part of life here.
But as we have already established, Morgan doesn’t need the outdoors to thrive - he just needs to put a skip on!
‘I’m not sure what looks I’d get in that costume whilst walking my dog!’ he laughs.
So, as Morgan Brind prepares to enter the surreal panto world of spending his time at home, ‘stacking the dishwasher in my heels to get my feet used to them again’, go show him some support and start your build up to Christmas in the most joyful way possible!
Little Wolf’s production of Cinderella is on at Derby Arena from December 6 to 31.
derbylive.co.uk/whats-on/cinderella2024.
