News that the famous luvvie Sir Ian McKellen has got in on the dame act has seen Berwick Kaler rising to the challenge. "Well, if he puts his arms across his chest, we know he's in trouble," a spirited Berwick tells Charles Hutchinson on the eve of Sleeping Beauty.

ENCOUNTERING Berwick Kaler in the heat of rehearsals is never predictable.

Amid his energy-boosting intake of baked beans in a coffee cup, a baked potato and cheese, he is testing out the pay-off line for the songsheet number in Sleeping Beauty, his 26th pantomime at York Theatre Royal.

"Should it be this?" he asks, starting to sing to the tune of Didn't We Have Lovely Time The Day We Went To Bangor, but substituting panto for the Welsh town. Or should it be this? Another lyric is tried out. Even over lunch, his Sleeping Beauty never sleeps.

There is always something to perplex him or stimulate him as he prepares to play Queen Vic. "The Financial Times wants to interview me for a feature on dames. Why would the Financial Times want to do a piece on the York Theatre Royal panto?"

Berwick, 58-year-old dame of dames, writer and co-director, would prefer the Theatre Royal pantomime to remain, in the words of the League Of Gentlemen, a local pantomime for local people.

"The national press seems to have the idea that here is this panto with no stars and you can't get a ticket because it's so popular... but we know you can get tickets, of course you can!

"I'm not sure that panto can take all this critical analysis. The fact is, if you do it well, it's the art behind it that doesn't show."

Pantomime is making news because the revered luvvie Sir Ian McKellen is to play the dame, Widow Twankey, in Aladdin And His Wonderful Lamp at the Old Vic Theatre, London from December 17 to January 23. The competitive streak in Berwick rises to the surface.

"Well, if he puts his arms across his chest, we know he's in trouble. I saw footage of an early rehearsal and he was walking down the wrong road."

Those big Kaler eyes have that mischievous look so often seen on the Theatre Royal stage, but he then makes a serious point. "If Ian McKellen really does it well, he could do panto a great favour. It could notch panto up to a level where it will no longer be quoted in derogatory terms, that thing where people say, 'What do you think this is, a pantomime?'.

"I hope it may lead to more actors doing pantomime, like we have here at the Theatre Royal," he says. "But panto is a funny thing in that you have to have a vaudeville appeal as well as an ability to act; unless you have the personality to go beyond the footlights, you can't do panto. You can be Sir Ian McKellen, one of the country's leading actors, and you can fail."

What is the magic formula, Berwick?

"If you treat it as an acting role, it won't work. You have to treat it like old music hall and vaudeville acts used to perform. It's not a question of being a comedian or the funniest man in the world. I've never told a gag in my life.

"You have to perform; in pantomime you have to work for every line and every laugh and people won't laugh if you just say a line. You have to use every bone in your body; there has to be an inner energy and every line must end with an upward inflection.

"People respond to a look, to the bond between actors - but I hate to intellectualise it. I just do it to the best of my ability," he says.

"What I'm saying, after nearly 40 years in panto, is you can't teach it. You can give them a little technique but they have to have a panto personality, which they're born with or not. It's very difficult to find another David Leonard or Martin Barrass or, most glorious of all, a Suzy Cooper his panto co-stars. They have that ability, and it just has to be a natural ability."

Berwick has done Sleeping Beauty once before, in 1995. "That was quite an adventurous panto and now I think the audience is ready for the full experimentation!"

Meaning? "Meaning it's a risk, this one, but people are not fools. We might say it's the same old rubbish every year but they're not going to spend money on the same show each year. If it was just the same, you might as well get a video out," he says. "That's why we've introduced the film sequences, to keep moving it on. At the moment people are saying it's the craziest one we've ever done but it's still panto. Who knows, in 40 years' time, someone might not do Sleeping Beauty unless it's our version."

Once the pantomime run is over, Berwick will take a foreign holiday break before returning to the Theatre Royal rehearsals to work on his first non-pantomime at the theatre since Trumpets And Raspberries in 1985. He will play cantankerous and obstinate shoe maker Henry Hobson in Harold Brighouse's Lancashire comedy Hobson's Choice from March 29 to April 16.

"I'd been asked by four other theatres to do a play in the spring - I don't know why! - but I thought 'Let's do a play in York, not Leeds or Leicester' and it fits in with my filming work for the second series of Distant Shores, which I'll be doing from April to September," he says.

Suddenly, with his rehearsal call imminent, a thought flashes across Berwick's mind. "Just thinking of Ian McKellen again... for once in my life, people might come up to him and say 'Well, you're not as good at panto as Berwick Kaler', when there have been plenty of times that people have said to me 'You're no Ian McKellen'!"

Sleeping Beauty, York Theatre Royal, December 8 to January 29. Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 09:20 Friday, December 03, 2004