Scott Paige is the Good Spirit on panto debut in Crawley

Sleeping Beauty will be at The Hawth from Friday, December 8- Sunday, December 31 (tickets on hawth.co.uk or by calling The Hawth box office, 10am-4pm, Monday to Friday on 01293 553636).

“I'm so excited. My first panto! I'm 33 and I did the usual amdram stuff early on and turned professional in 2014 when I graduated from drama school. Then I went straight into the West End in Made In Dagenham which sadly didn't do as well as they were hoping it would but it was a fantastic first job, to go straight from drama school into the West End. And I just loved absolutely everything about it. I was in my element. I think it did eight months in total. It was a great run but not as long as it should have been but it was just a wonderful experience. I was in a room with some incredible people, people like Gemma Arterton, these wonderful West End stars and movie stars and I just learned so much with regards discipline and just being in that situation. I was also swing so I was covering eight different men in the company.”

And now it's time for Scott's first-ever panto.

“It's really through my friend Carrie Hope Fletcher (who is appearing in Crawley as the evil Carrabosse) that it is happening. She did her first panto last year and she said to me ‘You need to do panto!’ She said that she just had the best time ever. She said she had the most incredible time and that if I ever had the opportunity I absolutely had to do it, and Paul Hendy (the producer) asked me if I wanted to do it. Carrie and I are absolutely best mates and we come as a package!”

So how will he approach his panto debut?

“I walked into the theatre and I said to myself ‘How am I going to do this?’ You should hear people say in theatre that you shouldn’t do too much, don't be too big.”

Scott isn't necessarily sure that that applies to panto: “I think the thing is just to have as much fun as you can, and really the bigger the better and the more extravagant you are the better and I think that just suits me down to a tee. I'm very, very excited.”

As for being the Good Spirit: “I think it must just be because I radiate goodness! But it's going to be fantastic to be opposite Carrie. She is playing the baddie and I am playing the goodie and it's going to be a fantastic challenge. I like to think it helps, the fact that we know each other so well. We love each other so much and we're both so close but now we're going to be on stage looking at each other as enemies. I think we have to be careful that we don't make each other laugh!

“I've never been to the Hawth before now. This is my first time here and it looks great. I've been to theatres all over the country but never here before, but I think we are going to have a really, really happy time here.”

Once again, the show will be written and directed by the award-winning Paul Hendy and produced by the same team behind the five-star box office smash-hit All New Adventures of Peter Pan.