Video: Backstage at Yorkshire’s biggest panto (Oh yes, we are!)

It’s morning one of rehearsals of Robin Hood, this year’s pantomime at Bradford Alhambra and, almost unfathomably, opening night is a mere 12 days away.

The cast and crew gather in the bar of the Alhambra’s Studio Theatre, many meeting each other for the first time. To an observer, the hours that are available to them from this point to create a top-notch show seem severely limited.

Yet there is no air of panic, no running about in a flap. Indeed, between the coffee, tea and Danish pastries, you might think you were at some kind of lovely tea party as opposed to the start of a process which will see the creation of one of the country’s most successful pantomimes.

“It’s like first day of school,” says Iain Stuart Robertson (Friar Tuck), who offers a friendly hello and handshake before asking what my involvement is. This is his first pantomime with Bradford and his surprise is easy to understand when I reveal I am not one of the panto production people but there to report on events.

It is a mark of just how confident a production the Bradford Alhambra panto is these days that I am allowed into this place normally kept sacrosanct. Company stage manager Tom Aspin gives me the low down on who’s who.

The cast are generally easy to spot, he says (there’s a lot of stage and TV experience between them – they’re recognisable, if not famous faces); if they’re fairly burly looking, the chances are they’re crew and “if they’re young and thin, those’ll be the dancers”.

I spot a group in a corner. Lithe, thin young things.

“Are you dancers by any chance?”

They are. Two of their number, Laura Watson and Katie Amos, aren’t just young – this will be their professional stage debut. They seem delighted and overwhelmed by the gathering of which they are a part. They repeat the same thing I hear time and again on the first morning, “It’s like the first day of school”.

At the other end of the scale, in every way imaginable, is the star of the show, Billy Pearce. Later on I ask him why he doesn’t play the diva.

“It’s just not in me to do that, I like people to have a good time and to enjoy it, that’s what we’re all here for,” he says.

That and lots of hard work.

Adam Renton, Bradford Theatres’ general manager, begins the welcome speeches by telling the assembled that already 63,000 tickets have been bought and the show is on target to beat its £1.2m projection for sales. By the time the show comes to an end – in February – it is expected that almost 100,000 people will have bought tickets.

Director Ed Curtis draws everyone together on the stage of the studio theatre, where cast and crew stand in a circle and introduce themselves. “I don’t particularly go in for read throughs, I just want to throw this up, get it on its feet and see how it looks,” says Curtis.

And then, it’s time for work. The principals (main actors to you and me) go into the low ceilinged bar area to start rehearsals while the dance troupe are put through their paces by choreographer Stillie Dee in the Studio. Warm ups are saved for the dancers, stretching their bodies into unlikely positions on the floor of the studio. In the bar the director takes his seat.

Forty minutes after the official 10am start of proceedings, it is clear to see why there was no panic on show at the breakfast gathering – I am watching at work a very well-oiled machine.

Andrew Ryan, a Bradfordian and one of the country’s most experienced pantomime dames, having played the part 21 times, is on stage running through his opening gambit. He stops and asks the director for clarification of a joke. The director decides to bring someone on from a different side of the stage to where he was entering, Billy enters and comes up with an idea involving tennis balls and his knees.

The ideas are flying round the room and changes are being made on the hoof.

It is difficult to explain exactly what a breakneck speed at which this is all happening and the lightning speed of communication between the creatives. I later discover there is a reason for this, but for the moment I marvel at the pace that everything appears to be coming together.

Andrew Ryan is banging through his lines, throwing out a performance. Billy is far more reserved – intense, almost quietly mumbling his way through his lines. He has the air of a man working things out, imagining every move on the stage.

The reason they have achieved this level of communication so swiftly is revealed when director Curtis breaks, finally, for lunch. He says he has been preparing for this show for six months, spending time with Billy, getting to know him and preparing to work with him.

“It means we have a shorthand and an understanding of how we can and will work together once we get in the room,” says Curtis. “That we come into the rehearsal room with a solid relationship is crucial – and that I understand what he is capable of and what he will do with a role like this is really important. He needs a director to be free enough to let him play around, but to set the parameters inside which that playing around will happen.”

The rehearsal rockets along so fast that, for a change of pace, I wander around the back of the room to see what the dancers are up to. Ridiculously they are moving at an even greater rate. Stillie Dee barks out and demonstrates 12 dance steps in about 10 seconds and I watch open-mouthed as the dancers repeat the high kicking, twirling moves, executing them perfectly.

She has worked extensively in panto, but equally in musical theatre, where the speed of the construction of the show is far slower than this. Does the pace of what is happening around her this morning terrify her? “I have been performing in pantos since I was 16, and I have now choreographed for something like 29 pantos, so what you have to realise is that everyone here is really on top of what it is they are doing. We all know exactly what needs to be done.”

The unspoken part of the sentence is “and we’re just getting on and doing it”. It’s a sentiment repeated around the rehearsal space all morning. Tom Aspin sums it up well: “We don’t go on at 10am on Sunday, or 9pm on Friday... we go up at 7.15pm on Saturday, December 17. There’s no choice, no saying to people that we aren’t quite ready. We simply have to be ready to put this show up.”

The show will, then, go on.

Which is why this machine is now at full pump, with the costumes being created over in a corner of the room where the principals are rehearsing. When the actors are off stage, they are grabbed and dragged into wardrobe for a fitting.

Generally speaking, the rehearsal room is a space where artists collaborate to create something powerful and beautiful and perhaps more importantly, entirely bespoke. The production-line feel of this rehearsal room is one of the reasons why some consider pantomime less artistically satisfactory than other forms of theatre.

Company manager Aspin has little time for this attitude. “The truth is, the reason we put this up in 12 days is because of the wage bill,” says Aspin, who holds the purse strings of his particular production. But we are working with seasoned professionals who know exactly what they are doing.”

Next door, Billy Pearce and Andrew Ryan are running through a section of dialogue.It is the first time Billy has really performed his lines during the morning and everyone off stage stops to listen.

The comic timing shows exactly why Billy, appearing this year in his 13th pantomime in Bradford, is such a draw for audiences. “It’s the only audience you get where you’re performing for grannies and grandkids with the same material,” he says. “Between now and when we open, I won’t get much sleep – I can’t learn lines in rehearsals, I have to learn them at home because I might be chopping and changing things.

“Right now it’s about finding the spaces for each other and working out how our performances are all going to gel together.”

Director Curtis is an award-winning young director who has been in charge of musicals, serious plays and comedy shows.

“There is nothing different about the process. You are telling a story and your job is to entertain people, and it really is as simple as that,” he says.

“I don’t go into a rehearsal room for a pantomime thinking any differently about how I need to work with the actors. The only difference is the time scale which means instead of 10-hour days, we put in 16-hour days – but that’s what we need to get the show up.

“Apart from that, this is no different from any other form of theatre. And the reason for that is because we want to do exactly what all theatre should do, which is entertain.”

Robin Hood is at Bradford Alhambra Theatre until February 5, 2012. Tickets 01274 432000.