Panto stars visit children at QA
Panto stars of the New Theatre Royal production of Aladdin visited children in the paediatric wards at Queen Alexandra Hospital on Friday, December 15.
Transcript
00:00 So my name's Anna Farthing and I'm the Chief Exec of the new Theatre Royal in Portsmouth.
00:04 So tell me where we are and what we're doing here today.
00:07 Today we're in the Children's Ward at the hospital and I'm really thrilled to be here.
00:11 In my previous role I was an Arts Programme Director for a hospital in Bristol and Weston
00:16 and it was fantastic to bring our pantomime characters here today and to think about how
00:21 we can work more closely together in the future.
00:24 What's the reaction been like from the children?
00:26 The children have absolutely been delighted to meet the characters.
00:30 Because our pantomime has different types of characters you can have a gentle moment
00:33 with a princess, you can have an adventurous moment with Aladdin, you can bond with little
00:39 wishy-washy or have hilarious gags from Widow Twankey.
00:43 So it's really worked well.
00:45 And obviously in a children's hospital you've got children aged from newborn right the way
00:49 through to 16, 17 year olds and all of our amazing actors have worked so hard to work
00:55 with children of all ages.
00:58 Tell me why it's important for visits like this?
01:02 Visits like this are really important because New Theatre Royal is also a charity and also
01:07 because we want to be able to work with everybody in the Portsmouth area whether or not they
01:12 can come to us.
01:13 If they can't come to us we'll go to them.
01:15 [BLANK_AUDIO]