The Fairy Gokmother: Representations of gender and sexuality in the Qdos pantomime Cinderella

Although cross-dressing is a long-standing pantomime tradition, recent pantomimes have featured a male actor playing a traditionally female part while not cross-dressing. An illustration of this is the part of the Fairy in a version of Cinderella developed by production company Qdos Entertainment and performed at the Milton Keynes Theatre in 2017–18, while being toured elsewhere in previous and later years. Casting British celebrity fashion consultant Gok Wan as the Fairy had transgressive potential to promote empowering and positively disruptive attitudes towards gender. Wan the celebrity, in a similar way to the Fairy in Cinderella, uses psychological transformation, with a helping hand from clothes, to give women more confidence in their bodies. However, the overriding focus of the pantomime was on signalling Wan’s homosexuality while dispelling it as harmless. Clichés about gay men were reinforced in the production and paratexts, particularly through the approach to transformation, the use of costuming to frame Wan as Other, the language around being a fairy and the emphasis on male friendship as opposed to romance. When each of these aspects is compared to alternative representations in other popular and widely circulated versions of Cinderella, the reductive nature of this pantomimic portrayal becomes clear, irrespective of Wan’s degree of complicity.