PANTO TIME
Anna Soden grew up in York and went to York Youth Theatre for a decade. She’s back in the city this Christmas as Dave the cow
You’re back in York – in 2020 you played the fairy in York Theatre Royal’s Travelling Pantomime which toured around the city...
It was a really special thing. It kind of felt like a fever dream – it was a little explosion of glitter in an apocalypse. Working in that cast of five with a skeleton creative team was a unique bonding experience. I really made such dear friends on that show, and I’m so happy to be reunited with lovely Robin this year. Performing on that little pop-up stage, our dressing rooms being disabled toilets/ storage cupboards, touring hotels, schools, churches and village halls, it felt like a gorgeous way to do panto. It was bursting with a sense of community and local identity. I’d love to see more theatre being made like that, not just when there’s a deadly pandemic.
Now you’re playing Dave the cow - both the front and the back half - in Jack and the Beanstalk, which you call ‘a massive career moo-ve’
I thought that sounds FUN and said yes. It’ll certainly be a career move, in that it’ll be a job in my career, and I will definitely say moo a lot.
Have you appeared in any other pantomimes?
Yes, I really get around the country. My first was the rock and roll pantomime at Liverpool Everyman – it was Sleeping Beauty, everyone played instruments and I was the fairy and got to fly. I also got to sing Golden Slumbers – a Beatles song, in
