Hi Jon, how are you doing today? Thanks so much for chatting to Stage to Page! Would you mind introducing yourself to our readers and telling us how you first got into the theatre industry?

I’m Jon Bradfield and there are two answers to this one! I worked for many years in theatre marketing, first at a ballet company and then a touring theatre company. But I started writing theatre when my co-writer Martin Hooper and I were in a gay running club and somebody suggested putting on a short pantomime as part of the group’s Christmas party. Panto is great for that because it has the basic story shapes, but you can reinvent them for whatever community you’re writing for. We did three of those shows after which we decided, firstly, that they were taking up rather too much of people’s drinking and dancing time, and secondly that it took a lot of work to make a show for only one performance so perhaps we should try and get pantomimes staged for a proper run. We sent a couple of scripts to producers and one, Peter Bull, happened to be setting up a theatre above a gay pub in Victoria called The Stag.

Above The Stag Theatre outgrew its first home and our pantos grew with it. We also did a play and a couple of musicals for ATS including a comic musical I was quite fond of about a gay football team who accidentally sign up for a non- gay international tournament in Spain. ATS closed a few years ago, but Martin and I set up our own company with our director Andrew, our regular dame Matt and a producer called Oli Sones so we could keep making them. The company is called, appropriately, He’s Behind You!

Your show, Beauty and the Beast: A Horny Love Story, is coming to Charing Cross Theatre from this November for panto season. Can you tell us about the story?

No spoilers! The central idea is what you might expect but packaged our way – a mash-up of traditional fairytale with a recognisable, modern, queer-influenced setting. We’re setting it in the far north of Scotland - I liked the idea of isolation, I’d recently read a folk horror novel set up there, and we wanted to make a show set in winter. There’s something about remote places that allows for slightly… unusual stories and characters whether that’s comic or unsettling. Also I really like writing in a Scots voice even though I can’t do the accent - in spite of being half Scottish! Hopefully our actors can…

We’re making a few cheeky nods to the Disney cartoon because that’s so well-known and fun to play with, but I’m not very interested in just making a parody, so our story is quite different, not least to make it feel like a panto. It’s quite an odd story for pantomime: In earlier versions – the 1940 French film, or early pantomimes – the main girl has two horrible sisters so it’s very similar to Cinderella, but - like Disney - we’ve jettisoned that because we’ll want to do Cinderella soon! But it’s unusual as a panto because although most fairytales have a romance, they aren’t really love stories, whereas in Beauty and the Beast the lovers spend a lot of time together – it’s a romcom of sorts but a very twisted one because one of them is the other’s prisoner.

It’s a fun challenge – you don’t have the big obvious beats that other stories have but you’ve got space to play with romance. And of course, because it’s for adults you can be very overt about sexual desire.

Adult pantomime has become increasingly popular in recent years. What do you think it is about the genre that's pulling in a bigger audience each festive season?

It’s big, it’s colourful, it’s magical, it’s noisy. Winter’s a time to gather and tell stories. There’s something about the scale of panto – I don’t just mean physically, I mean the imaginative, magical scope of it – that is just as fun for adults as kids, and by making it for adults you get to have a lot more kinds of humour and play with a bigger (and ruder!) range of ideas. It’s very loose and you can talk directly to the audience, so you can pull in all sorts of topical references without it disturbing the make-believe. I think adult panto overall in recent years has become popular thanks to gay and queer pantomimes like ours, and I think it’s fun to reclaim these stories we all know from childhood by queering them up.

The songs in Beauty and the Beast: A Horny Love Story are originals written by yourself. Can you tell us what audiences can expect from the music in the show?

They’re a work in progress but expect a mix of pop, musical theatre and Disney-style stuff with a bit of a Celtic folk sound to it – and all with a very comic vibe. I particularly enjoy writing love songs that are genuinely heartfelt but also really fucking filthy, so there’s at least one of those.

My blog is called Stage to Page. But if you could turn any book, from page to stage, what would it be and why?

Ooh, does this question come with a commission? I haven’t said this publicly yet: many years ago, we did a panto of Treasure Island but I’m currently revisiting the book in non-panto form. I was sitting outside a pub in a little harbour in Devon last year while a sea shanty festival was going on and I suddenly thought it would be delicious to do a sea shanty musical based on Treasure Island, with original songs in the style of old sea songs and a very queered-up story. I’ve been reading books about pirates and writing songs. I hope it can come to something.

I’d also love to adapt something ghostly or spooky. My favourite novel is probably The Testament of Gideon Mack by a brilliant Scottish writer, James Robertson, which I’d love to adapt for screen but it’s such an idiosyncratic book and I can’t work out how to do it. Read it though, it’s wonderful, heartbreaking and unlike anything else I’ve read.

And finally, why should people book tickets to see Beauty and the Beast: A Horny Love Story?

I’ve got this thing called a mortgage. It’s only a shared-ownership one, but still.

But if altruism isn’t enough of a motive, I promise you a couple of hours of big belly laughs, silliness, elegantly-phrased filth, and delightful sights and sounds.

You can book tickets to Beauty and the Beast: A Horny Love Story, here.