SHORTLY before I am due to interview actor, writer and director extraordinaire Johnny McKnight, I see the breaking news that comedian Joe Lycett has made the eye-catching announcement that, unless former England footballer David Beckham renounces his £10 million deal to be an ambassador for Qatar during the forthcoming World Cup, the comedy star will shred £10,000 of his own money.
Lycett’s beef with Beckham is that – despite having been a longstanding icon for, and a perceived ally of, the LGBTQ+ community – he has opted to take a massive payout from a regime that criminalises homosexuality.
What, I wonder, does McKnight – a famously gay artist whose work has often spoken candidly and powerfully about gay experience in Scotland – make of Lycett’s stance?
“I’m off social media,” he says, “but someone pointed it out to me this morning.
“It’s quite something else, isn’t it? Part of me thinks, ‘100% he’ll shred it, but then it’ll become a total culture war’.”
McKnight’s concern is that, should Lycett shred the cash by his self-imposed deadline of 12 noon today, some right-wing commentators – who, let’s say, don’t exactly have the LGBTQ+ community’s best interests at heart – will use the incident as an excuse to attack a supposedly “woke” comedian for destroying money during a cost of living crisis.
“Or”, the actor suggests, “is Beckham going to say, ‘I’m donating half of my fee [from Qatar] to charity?’”
Worried though he is about the possibility of Lycett’s stunt backfiring – not only on the Brummie comedian, but also on the wider LGBTQ+ community – McKnight is pleased that, at the very least, “it’s getting folk talking about it”.
In that sense, he sees Lycett’s intervention as akin to Ian Hislop’s recent takedown on Have I Got News for You? of avowedly left-wing former footballer Gary Neville (who is going to the Qatar World Cup as a TV pundit).
McKnight and I agree – both on the complexities of the issue and the need for more open discussion of the vicious homophobia of the Qatari state (not to mention the appalling loss of life among migrant construction workers building stadia and other projects for the World Cup).
However, important though this issue is, it wasn’t the intended topic of our conversation.
The primary purpose of our get together is to discuss McKnight’s latest pastiche pantomime for Glasgow’s Tron Theatre. Titled The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the show is, of course, inspired by the famous 1939 movie starring Judy Garland.
McKnight is not only the writer and director of the show, he also takes on the role – liberally inspired by Garland – of the pantomime dame Dorothy Blawna-Gale.
As ever with his Christmas shows (which he has been writing for both the Tron and the MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling for more than a decade), we can expect a show with its tongue lodged firmly in its cheek.
McKnight’s festive offerings tend to send up pantomime conventions something rotten. However, with this show, the over-the-top costumes and West of Scotland humour have to vie with the writer’s tremendous affection for the movie.
The Tron show is McKnight’s third time performing in a show rooted in Frank L Baum’s much-loved novel from 1900.
“The first show I ever did in amdram was The Wiz [the 1974 soul musical by Charlie Smalls, William F Brown et al], and I played the Lion,” the actor remembers. Following that, his debut at the MacRobert, in 2005, was in the Stirling theatre’s Christmas version of The Wizard of Oz.
Once again, he played the role of the lovable, but cowardly, Lion.
McKnight has, he explains, “always put off doing it as a panto”. However, during the Covid pandemic he realised, “you get these gigs [such as creating pantos for the Tron] for a while, but you don’t get them forever.
“Young blood has to come through,” he says. Consequently, he decided, “I need to give it a go, before I’m pushed and I’m saying, ‘I never got a chance to do it’.”
Few people who have followed McKnight’s work over the years will be surprised that he has long harboured an ambition to stage his own version of Baum’s story. “I’m a gay cliche,” he says, “I loved The Wizard of Oz as a kid. It totally was my Christmas film.”
The writer admits that his love of the film has had a slightly restraining influence on his creative process. “I haven’t gone as anarchic with it as I thought I would,” he admits.
Even in the rehearsal room, he says, he finds himself saying, “no, that’s not right, it needs to be a wee bit closer to the film”. Gallus Glasgow panto this may be, but McKnight still wants, he says, “to pay homage to the film”.
The writer is steeped in the history of the film. “I love all that stuff you read about it being a metaphor for the death of agriculture and the steel industry,” he says.
That political-historical dimension isn’t necessarily prominent in the Tron show, he says, but he kept it in mind while writing his version. After all, he adds, “its’ part of the magic of it”.
A big part of the magic of McKnight’s pantos is his casting. As so often, this year’s Tron show combines old friends, such as the wonderful Julie Wilson Nimmo, and new ones, including Alaskan actor and Scottish accents specialist Tyler Collins.
The Tron panto opens on November 23, exactly a week before McKnight’s other Christmas show, Maw Goose, opens at the MacRobert (running from November 30 to December 31).
With more than a decade of panto-making under his belt, McKnight has learned that it’s “like a good Pixar movie”.
“You just need to tell the story from beginning to end. You can have all the mad stuff around it, but everybody will stay on the journey if they know what you’re talking about.”
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz plays the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, November 23 to January 8: tron.co.uk
