After two years away, Geoff Marsh and his troupe of buffoons are back with a new barmy pantomime, The Princess and the Dragon. MARION SAUVEBOIS finds out what persuaded him out of retirement

CALL it writer’s block, synapse overdrive or creative fatigue, but after 15 years dreaming up wild tales, berserk skits and batty gags peopled with dopey dames, crocs and Chinese policemen, Stage Struck’s Geoff Marsh hung up his boots and packed up Mother Goose.

But retirement, he realised in the solitude of his office, was not quite what it was cut out to be.

Tucked away from the limelight for two long years, he itched to get back to his old panto antics – and eventually ran out of excuses not to.

“I had genuinely run out of ideas,” says Geoff, every bit the garish dame, his cheeks and lips scarlet from dabs of rouge and eyebrows concrete sweeps of yellow powder. “And I was not interested in repeating the same thing; that’s why me and my wife Jane gave up Stage Struck. It was like a conveyor belt. We were doing the variety show every May and then in January we were already planning the pantomime. We never did anything else.”

“But I really missed it a lot last year,” he confides. “People had asked me do it again and I thought, let me find reasons not to do it. The first one was: can I get a cast? Everybody I asked said yes. I thought, I’m not going to find a venue to rehearse and New College said, ‘We’ve got a lovely room for you’. We found a musical director and I contacted the arts centre and they said we could have it. I ran out of reasons not to do it. Not having the burden of doing other shows, it all felt a bit more relaxed.”

Just like that he was back on the panto bandwagon again – though no longer under the Stage Struck umbrella. Weeks later, the cast were already pouring over the script of The Princess and the Dragon.

For all his boundless imagination and powers of invention, the crux of the story was whispered to him by an unlikely source: his trustee and rather ambitious costume designer Kim Missen.

“She had made an incredible goose, for Mother Goose, the best giant I have ever seen on stage for Jack and The Beanstalk and a crocodile for Peter Pan. So I said to her, ‘You’ve done all this, what can you do next?’ and she said she’d always wanted to do a dragon. I said, ‘Ok, the next panto will be called the Princess and the Dragon’, and that was it,” he cackles.

The plot follows the scheming Wicked Witch, played by Geoff’s 18-year-old daughter Sammi, who strikes a deal to hand over the beautiful Princess Megan to the ravenous beast in exchange for some of its scales – which are the key to eternal youth and beauty.

“It has as many potholes as a sieve,” he stifles a deep belly laugh.

The old-timer starred in his first amateur panto at the age of 16.

During rehearsals, he befriended the company’s four-fingered (on both hands) pianist, a certain Uncle Don, who taught him a glut of old fashioned skits, which he still calls upon to this day.

“He was a terrible pianist,” laughs the father-of-two. “He missed out notes sometimes. But he would teach me jokes and I found out about this wonderful world of gags and sketches.”

No sooner had the run ended than he set out to pen his own take on Cinderella, ready for the festive season. He peddled the script to local primary schools offering to stage the show in their assembly halls and cast schoolmates in his sixth form for the performance.

Listening to him reel off about the show’s precocious lead, seven-year-old Megan Smith, and his plans to make Swindon history – and flout every health and safety rule - by “getting every child on stage” for the big finale (“Dame trampled by kids, that will be the headline in the paper,” he rolls his eyes.) it is hard to believe he could ever have drawn a line under his pantomime career; as either a humble scribe or actor. After all, this is a man who once caused quite the stir at Loughborough University by staging a ‘bootleg’ panto.

“They would not let first years do anything,” recalls Geoff. “Only come in and pretend to be trees, things like that. So again I went round primary schools and asked if they wanted qa panto. So wedid it with the rest of the freshers. The university was not happy. They said we couldn’t do it and I said, ‘We are, so there!’

Emboldened by his success, the following year the cheeky student booked the university’s own theatre to stage his panto.

“They were even more angry,” grins Geoff, who met his wife performing in Dick Whittington alongside Barbara Windsor in 1985. “A couple of years ago I learnt that it’s now part of the curriculum for first years to do a panto.”

Although he is the author of and token dame in The Princess and the Dragon, he insists, his wife Jane Osborne is the puppet-master behind the fiddly operation.

“She does everything,” he adds modestly. “She is directing, she’s even painted some of the scenery, she gets the music together. She is the choreographer. The only thing she doesn’t do is perform. I just turn up to rehearsals.”

The stakes are high for their anticipated return. After a two-year absence, the public’s expectation have skyrocketed and a flop could spell out the end for Geoff and his merry band. But he is confident this is his zaniest production yet.

“I hope it will be our best. I can’t wait. It’s been far too long.”

The Princess and the Dragon runs at the Arts Centre from Thursday, November 24 to Saturday 26. To book go to swindontheatres.co.uk or call 01793 524 481.