‘I learned to sword fight in heels’: how Susie McKenna is rewriting the rules of Panto

Few people have their spindle-pricked finger on the panto pulse like the writer-director Susie McKenna, whose festive formula has set the tone of theatre's Christmas canon for decades. Within panto land, her name frequently attracts the prefix "legend", and no wonder; a former principal boy (the panto's young male protagonist role, traditionally given to a woman) who steered two decades of festive outings at the Hackney Empire in east London, in the process rerooting theatre's once-commercial juggernauts in the local community. There she staged fairytale reimaginings of everything from Puss in Boots to Mother Goose; in 2019, she retold Dick Whittington as a young Jamaican who boarded the Empire Windrush in search of his fortune in London.

This year, McKenna turns her attention – and her locally anchored, uplifting, politically witty scripts – south of the river, to Catford's refurbished Broadway theatre, in the borough of Lewisham, south-east London, where a "modern remix" of Sleeping Beauty opens next month .

"Story is everything," says McKenna, from her north London home. Her latest pantomime transports the gothic fairytale to the warring kingdoms of Lewishtonia and Westminsteria, where Lewishtonia's magical beings have been dismissed as a threat to the existence and drain on the resources of their neighbours. Cursed Sleeping Beauty, daughter of a slain warrior queen, is asleep but betrothed to Westminsteria's prince, in a marriage intended to seal an uneasy peace.

McKenna first wrote a version of Sleeping Beauty in 2016, in response to Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump: "I was so angry about how our country was being divided, the way people were using and blaming the other. I started embedding a lot of social comment. Panto lets you get something off your chest."

She modernises fairytale love too: it is the non-romantic love of Dame Nanny Nora, who raised the princess, and not the prince's kiss that wakes her from her spellbound slumber.

McKenna, 62, who came of age in the 70s' feminist wave, does away with the fairytale vilification of stepmothers and representation of passive women. "There are battles of will and intelligence and trickery," she says of her heroines. "Above all, this is about becoming the other and how love can overcome."

For McKenna, pantomime is a tool of transformation, combining the fantastical and funny with familiar stories to enrich what is often people's first (and many times only) theatre trip. It's an approach that she wants to carry from Hackney to Catford, where the 92-year-old, Grade-II listed Broadway theatre reopened last year after a £7m future-proofing restoration.

"I thought I was pantoed out until someone said there's a theatre that's been closed for four years. I walked the streets and it reminded me of Hackney 25 years ago," she remembers of writing Jack and the Beanstalk for the theatre's reopening season last year. "You have the soul of a local community in these places where there's so much hardship and poverty but so much flavour and vibrance. If you get the community in one space, enjoying one show, you've cracked it."

Panto has been transformative in McKenna's life, too. Born in north-west London to variety performer parents, her earliest memory is of joining them on stage in smoke-filled working men's clubs, aged two. "The pianist held me back like a whippet then let me go," she says, recaling how she found the audience's smiles intoxicating.

After the family moved to Leicestershire when she was 16, McKenna joined dance schools and the ensemble of Puss in Boots at her local community theatre then left school to pursue a stage career. At 19, she landed a principal boy role at Oldham Coliseum, then reprised that role under the direction of the panto veteran Kenneth Alan Taylor, for eight more years at Nottingham Playhouse, before making her way at Hackney.

"Panto has always been a safe space for duality," she says. "I'm a real tomboy. I could find that side of myself but I also wanted to play a hero that was without doubt a woman. I learned to sword fight in heels."

It was after Hackney asked her to direct a "big, commercial" Jack and the Beanstalk in 1994, starring EastEnders' Michelle Collins, that McKenna suggested transposing Nottingham's community-centric model – a financial linchpin for the theatre and highlight for local people – on to Hackney. The theatre came back three years later, after McKenna's West End stint as Gumbie in Cats, ready to give it a go.

During Cinderella, in the second year of the partnership with the theatre, McKenna met the actor Sharon D Clarke, cast as the fairy godmother. They married on Hackney's stage in 2008: "See: truly transformative."

"It was a panto that started it all for me," she adds. "It still is for many artists. You have to find the artists who are fearless and have funny bones."

With this in mind, it was the commitment to a community talent pipeline that made her "jump in" again in Catford. For her Sleeping Beauty, cast have been recruited from local drama schools and creatives from colleges. Half of the cast and crew have local links.

Durone Stokes, who plays the prince, was born in Lewisham hospital; the Broadway theatre was the first stage he performed on (he has also appeared in Dreamgirls in the West End). The show's producer, Chuchu Nwagu, (whose co-production credits include Shifters and Dreamgirls) explains: "There's something mesmerising about standing on the same stage where others have gone on to do great things and believing that you can, too. It's so important we inspire a new generation to think about how this is a viable career."

The theatre will put 600 £1 tickets on sale for local people. By upskilling people on his doorstep, Nwagu's ambition is to diversify theatre's on- and off-stage talent pool, benefiting community first, then industry: "We hope in that in 10 years' time they will be the biggest lighting designers, costume designers in the West End, Broadway, Australia."

Panto started it all for him too. Nwagu, 30, first met McKenna as a boy. Aged eight, he won tickets through his local paper to see Aladdin at the Millfield theatre, Edmonton, north London, his first theatre trip: "I was so mesmerised by the talent, the spectacle, the jokes, the lights. I was invited on stage to sing the song sheet; looking out, I thought: 'This is what life could be.'"

He took out a notepad at home and started writing panto scripts. In secondary school, he travelled to Hackney, alone, to see a McKenna panto and emailed her afterwards, full of enthusiasm: "She invited me to meet and told me: 'I'm sure we'll work together one day,'" he says. "I know the power of what theatre and panto can do for a child, a community, a family."

Panto "shouldn't be a luxury", he says: "People of all walks of life, who traditionally aren't theatregoers, go into a building and share an experience, forgetting the issues they're sometimes facing together, outside, in their community. Buy-in works both ways. It's important for communities to not just feel that they are recipients, that they're participants."

McKenna agrees: "The audience become the last member of the cast. The rhythms of the show only settle once the audience is sitting there and you get them to respond. The way you control is by making sure they're not bored," she continues. "I write the shows with the idea that you leave your adult self behind and your six-, seven-, eight-year-old self enjoys it alongside your kids and grandkids."

For McKenna this means gags for all ages: "I like saucy, cheeky – that's the bawdy nature of panto – but not blue. You don't need misogyny and racism or sexism to the point that people are uncomfortable."

Next year, McKenna plans to bring her Windrush Dick Whittington to Catford: a homage to her late mother-in-law who came to Britain, from Jamaica, in the 1950s. And she is mulling a new Aladdin, in which the hero is washed up, seeking asylum, on foreign shores. At their heart will be the same values and creativity that drive Sleeping Beauty: "At the end of the day I write for the audience that's there. As Londoners we live cheek by jowl with each other; I always hope everybody can see themselves in someone."