Who's doing this interview, me or you? CHARLES HUTCHINSON conducts his annual meeting with York panto dame Berwick Kaler

BERWICK Kaler has just had a full medical at the Nuffield. "I'm 55 years young now, and everything is normal. My blood pressure is normal; my temperature is normal; my cholesterol level is normal. I know people always think I must be abnormal to do what I do but no, everything is normal," he says.

What Berwick does, of course, is play York Theatre Royal's pantomime dame to the mad maximum for 65 performances, and write the script, and co-direct the show with artistic director Damian Cruden.

In rehearsal at Walmgate since November 19, Berwick is back for his 23rd Theatre Royal pantomime, working on "what must be about my fourth attempt at Jack And The Beanstalk".

"Notice I say 'attempt'," says Berwick, displaying his customary pre-run nerves in the countdown to next Tuesday's opening night.

"But then I'm always thrilled with the reaction we get to the panto each year. More and more people in the business come to look at what we do, to see if they can in some way copy it - but they can't, and that's the beauty of it."

Typical Berwick, nervous one moment, full of chest-puffing pride in the Theatre Royal panto the next.

Playing Fanny Shufflebottom this year, he is particularly pleased to have re-assembled what he considers the Theatre Royal's premier panto line-up: not only perennial goofing sidekick Martin Barrass, in his 16th show, as Willy Shufflebottom, and the dark duke of baddies, David Leonard, as Dr Egostein, but also the principal boy-and-girl partnership of Joanne Heywood and the Kylie of York panto, Suzy Cooper.

Joanne returns to the frantic fray as Jack Shufflebottom and Suzy follows up her autumn repertory appearances in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Les Liaisons Dangereuses by playing Jill.

"I'm walking on air because Suzy's back after a year away," says Berwick. "For me, it makes the show's balance right.

"I always wanted to break the pantomime mould that you can't be pretty and be funny, and I have that thing about posh birds being funny! And then there's something ridiculous about having this Geordie washer woman Berwick's dame who has this upper-class daughter. That's the thing about this panto being different."

Another case in point is the show's big, very big, new addition: the 6ft 7in Richard Ashton, who has been a towering presence in such Theatre Royal productions as Bouncers, Frankenstein and this summer's The Three Musketeers.

"If anyone else was doing, for example, Babes In The Wood, they would cast Richard as Little John but I wouldn't!" says Berwick. To prove the point, Richard will not be playing the man-munching giant in Jack And The Beanstalk but Dr Egostein's failed prototype, Beanpole.

"Richard is really part of the panto team now. We'd done about ten days' rehearsals and he hadn't quite got it but then suddenly everyone fell about laughing as they watched him and I said 'Well done, you have got it'.

"The thing with pantomime is that just because you have a funny line, it doesn't mean anything. You really have to work at it. You have to have that energy," says Berwick, displaying bags of passion himself. "You don't have to lose your voice but you have to develop that thing called the panto voice, where it goes a little lower, a little thicker, to get you through the run."

As ever, Berwick will be looking to combine innovations with the traditional assets of the Theatre Royal pantomime: comic teamwork, wonderful costumes and sets, Kaler ad-libs, local and topical references. Obviously he can't say too much about this year's new hi-tech ingredient, except that it involves film, but he also promises a return for the 3-D special effect (the one involving the football seemingly going out into the audience and back again), as well as a fresh angle to the traditional Kaler and Barrass water slapstick scene. "We must treat Jack And The Beanstalk as new every time we do it, because there'll always be a new generation coming to the show - and there are one or two things that we can do in Jack that only work in Jack. So wait and see for yourself!"

Berwick has been driving himself as hard as ever in his panto preparations. "If my mind didn't keeping working on new ideas, I'd have given up doing the York panto at least five years ago," he says. "The hard slog is trying to make it different, and innovative, each year. Around us there are so many pantos where they don't even know what gags were told last year, so you just get the same jokes year after year.

"Not us! But it is very difficult to come up with new slogans and gags. You could ask ten people to think of a gag and they'd come back with ten dirty ones. Ask them to think of a clean one for a young audience and they're stumped."

Already 38,000 tickets have been sold for this Beanfeast: proof positive that this vintage panto still has wheels - and Wagon Wheels.

Jack And The Beanstalk, York Theatre Royal, December 12 to February 2. Tickets: £6.35 to £17.50 with concessions available; ring 01904 623568