‘What do we clean the costumes with? Vodka!’ Inside Britain’s panto powerhouse

The giant takes a lumbering step forward, her arms swinging heavily like battering rams. A whooping cackle flies out as Robbie Abbott tries to find the right lever to make the giant blink. “That’s her mouth!” calls Emily Wood from the warehouse-floor turned catwalk, and Abbott scrambles to raise the giant’s jaw – just as Wood leaps in to save us all from getting knocked over by an enormous fist.

Sitting on muddy land rented from a farmer in Kent, this monumental corrugated warehouse is a Santa’s grotto of pantomime treasures. Although his normal role is as a workshop assistant, Abbott will soon be stomping down from a beanstalk on stage at the Grove theatre in Dunstable, Bedfordshire. “I’ll keep practising,” he beams. Nearby a sedate velvet unicorn looks on, unperturbed.

The giant, designed by Mike Coleman, is one of the few things that wasn’t made in-house here at the HQ of pantomime powerhouse Evolution Productions. As well as their woodwork, costume and painting workshops, it houses 20 different sets, each one taking up two trucks’ worth of storage. Wood runs the company with her husband, Paul Hendy, who writes, directs and produces, and who she describes fondly as being “absolutely obsessed” with panto. Once the shows are up and running, they watch, between them, each of their pantos every week for the duration of the run.

This year they are doing 10 shows, from Sheffield to Shrewsbury, with Canterbury’s Marlowe theatre the biggest. Our photographer is bemused by how excited I am to spot the Marlowe’s famous bench from its iconic ghost gag scene, a mainstay of the venue’s panto. At some point in every show, usually in the middle of a chase, the cast take a break on this old wooden bench where they’re plucked off one by one by dancing ghosts. It’s a scene I have hoarsely yelled along to with my family for years, and one loved by Marlowe loyalists. They tried to replace the bench one year and there were practically riots. “Well,” Wood and I sing in dizzy explanation, complete with the knee-slaps and swinging arms, “we’ll have to do it again then, won’t we? Whoops!”

The company was started by Wood’s parents, as Kevin Wood Productions, in 1982. Then Wood and Hendy bought it in 2005. At the end of the long main space of the warehouse, a giant yellow eye peers out from a green scaly head. “That’s Kevin,” Wood says. “Kevin the kraken and Helga the dragon.” She points at another creature hidden in the depths of the organised chaos. “In honour of my parents.” Her dad was a producer, too, and her mum only stopped designing for the company a few years ago.

Now the design is led by Michelle Marden, who has in her office an essential box of “beanstalk repair materials”. We find her marking up a joke-shop front in the paint room. It’s one of the last pieces to be made before the set goes off to the Marlowe for Aladdin. The paint workshop has giant set pieces balanced on wooden frames, the walls lined with boxes of every imaginable colour of glitter. She estimates that each set uses 50kg of the stuff; even in the warehouse, the doorframes are glittering gold. “We use yacht varnish to make it stay put,” Marden reveals, touching the shimmering frame of a magic mirror to test if it’s still tacky. “We want it to be bulletproof.”

A modern pantomime tends to tell one of a handful of rotating stories, of which Aladdin is one of the most popular. But with its orientalist depiction of a vague and mystical east, often performed by primarily white casts, the show rightly draws controversy. Replacing the Victorian setting of a cartoonish Chinese laundry with a joke shop is part of Evolution’s desire to remove any crude, racist ideas from the show. “Of course, you don’t want someone doing a horrible stereotypical Chinese accent or look,” says Wood plainly, “but the story isn’t problematic. Those tropes are.”

In the Marlowe’s production, starring Strictly’s Kevin Clifton, the show has moved from China into a mythical land, like that of Snow White. “We thought:let’s get rid of everything that has a possibility of causing offence,” Wood says. “Let’s strip it back, then hopefully Aladdin can go on for the next 20 years.” As well as increasing diversity in their casting, they have asked a sensitivity reader to go through the script. “It’s easy for me to sit here as a white woman making assumptions,” Wood acknowledges. “We wanted to have those discussions with people who are far more in the know.”

Further into the wood workshop, a pirate flag hangs proudly on the wall, a leftover from an old production of Peter Pan. Jon Marsh stops sanding and produces a dusty blueprint from under a pile of power tools. He came here from working at the Marlowe, and now his life is panto year-round. “The thing that keeps me going is we sell about a million tickets,” he says, “so we have a million people laughing at our shows. If you leave the theatre at the same time as all the kids, you hear them chatting. It’s a bit of magic.”

On the next table over, Marsh’s dad, Kevin, is splicing together the wood for Marden’s joke shop. “A cow will poke its head through there,” he says, indicating with his saw. He is fairly new to the workshop. “I came to refurbish some steel shelves in January and I’ve been here ever since.” It’s a familiar story; Marden started here doing work experience and has never left. Later, I meet Ali Gray in wardrobe, a tape measure slung around her shoulders. Having been made redundant not long before, she took her dog for a walk near the warehouse, noticed a sign about a costume sale, and ended up getting a job.

Since the early 18th century, pantomime has graced Britain’s theatres, but it’s only since the 1900s that it has been in a form recognisable as what we stage today. The gag-filled musical productions have become a critical part of the theatrical ecosystem. “Pantomime provides about a third to half of a theatre’s income for the whole year,” Wood explains, “so if a theatre can have a good panto season, it either gives them a bit of financial security, or they can use it for putting on shows that are more experimental but which won’t sell as much. It allows them to give variety.”

Despite its necessity for the sector and its unique ability to attract every generation of a family to the theatre, panto is often looked down on. “I think people used to get away with putting on substandard shows,” Wood considers. “You can see there’s an awful lot of work and investment here. We try to give a really good quality show. But there was a period when people weren’t doing that, and shows were tacky and rude. That’s just cheap comedy. But the world changed a bit when Ian McKellen started doing panto and some more serious actors said, ‘Yeah, it’s OK to do it.’” Thirteen shows a week – two shows a day, with three on a Saturday – is no easy feat. “It’s really exhausting work.”

To withstand the stress of being donned and doffed 13 times a week, panto costumes have to be hardy. “Vodka!” says Nikki Weston, wielding scissors, as we walk into the costume department. The costumes will all be properly dry-cleaned at the end of each run, but until then, they’re just cleaned with vodka. “When you come back in January, everything absolutely stinks.” The outlandish outfits are made of so many different materials that a normal washing machine would chew them up and spit them out all wrong.

Instead, they get a spritz of the spirit mixed with water and Zoflora, a concentrated disinfectant. “It’s a recognised thing across the industry,” Weston says. “Same in ballet. You can’t wash a tutu.” To help soak up the worst of the sweat, they use armpit sweat pads tacked into costumes. These are, thankfully, washed after each show.

Wood points to boxes piled high in another storeroom, saying, “They’ll all have been used”: rat boots, bum rolls, “funny hats” and “hooks (pirates)”. “We really do try and keep things for as long as they’ll last. There are costumes here that are probably my age.” This is an attitude passed down from her mum, who started in a traditional repertory theatre, working in Scarborough with Alan Ayckbourn. It extends beyond the shows; above the toilets in the warehouse are lamps from Captain Hook’s boat, lit red when engaged.

Wood rummages through a box labelled “Diamonds”. “What would someone think if they tried to rob the place?” she asks with a laugh as she brings out a glittering blue gem rescued from an evil villain’s lair. She looks around at the pumpkins, the plungers, the oversized ostrich. “We’ve just got a lot of weird shit.”

• Jack and the Beanstalk is at the Grove theatre, Dunstable, until 31 December. Aladdin is at the Marlowe theatre, Canterbury, until 7 January.