If the wig fits

Rugby boys in dresses, bankers in tights, aristocrats in full Mars and Venus regalia: why do we Britons shed all inhibitions in the face of fancy dress, asks Kit Hesketh-Harvey

- Kit Hesketh-Harvey

SHE applies lipstick, getting ready for the quotidian—but should he apply lipstick, prepare for something extraordinary. When we put on a uniform, add the final flourishes to a stage costume or tie a tie, we experience that rush of alien energy, releasing us from our usual identity. The masked theatrical chorus of classical Athens understood the paradox. To wear a mask, of whatever kind, does not conceal. Counterintuitively, it reveals. The conscious self is displaced. Instead arrives something unfamiliar, exciting, instinctive, other—and heady, because we are unfamiliar with its possible consequences.

Darkness, with its ambiguities, seals the pact. It’s that time of year, of long nights of Hallowe’en disguise, of pantomime, of mummers and of the Feast of Fools, which subverts and inverts the order of things. The sun god Apollo cedes to Dionysos, god of revelry, of dissipation,chaos and theatre, yes, but also the god of expurgation and healing.

As a child in East Africa, I remember the blessing of the house. The magic men, in their animal skins, beads, feathers and Obeah face paint, terrifying in the torchlight, drumming furiously as they encircled me. That was Dionysos. Playing in pantomime, I, most recently, and for the first time, had to drag up, as Wicked Queen Carabosse. During those seven weeks, I found myself in command of a powerful new vocabulary—of gesture, of glance, of a kicking of the train—that I had never, could never, have used as a man.