There’s only one shade of Gray in Pantoland

Actor Andy Gray appears to be arriving at the stage door, his woolly hat and winter coat keeping the cold at bay. However, like the panto he stars in, nothing is quite as it seems.

Out of shot, his attire is completed by a pair of pyjama bottoms and slippers. He’s been resting between performances – there was a matinee at 2pm. To add to an already bizarre sight, one of the show’s dancers nips past. He’s just popped out to the shops, resplendent in green football shorts, trainers, jacket, spiky hair and a full face of stage make-up. He looks like something out of Christmas TOWIE. These are the sights that audiences never see.

A few minutes later, now with less than half an hour to go, the house is open and the sound of excited voices filters through the dressing room Tannoy. It’s time for Andy to start his pre-show routine, which means make-up and music.

His Spotify playlist is an eclectic mix of Amy Winehouse, Doris Day, Johnny Cash, Elvis, Joe Pesci and the Captain Scarlet, Magnificent Seven and Thunder- birds themes.

Pots of vitamins pills, throat lozenges and potions of every description nestle to his left. Before him, his make-up, which he sits down to apply. Cinderella is Andy’s tenth King’s panto. His first, back in 1995, was also Cinderella, when he played an Ugly Sister alongside Edinburgh’s most famous actor/angler Paul Young.

“I remember Paul was doing the fishing programme Hooked On Scotland at the time and wouldn’t shave his moustache,” laughs Andy. “So he kept it and we made lots of HRT jokes.”

Andy’s next King’s panto was another Cinderella four years later, when he played Baron Hardup. The following year, in Peter Pan, he turned baddie as Captain Hook.

“Peter Pan was instrumental in the current team of Allan Stewart, Grant Stott and I coming together,” he recalls. “The director had made it a very English show, and that was a difficulty.

“At the time the King’s said, ‘We need to have a bit more Edinburgh identity in our panto’.”

The Perth-born actor returned in Dick Whittington, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Jack and the Beanstalk – twice – and Aladdin, in which he played Elvis McSporran. “I had a great Elvis suit made for that, which was brilliant because I am a huge Elvis fan.”

Mother Goose in 2005 saw Andy as Hamish McFly and, a year later, he came full circle with another Cinderella when, to celebrate its centenary, the King’s again looked to the tale of the girl with the glass slipper to enchant audiences – it was Cinderella, starring a 16-year-old Phyllis Dare, that had opened the Old Lady of Leven Street 100 years before.

In the 2005 production, Andy again played Baron Hardup.

“That was great but turned out to be my last before my wilderness years,” he says.

Indeed, Cinderella would be Andy’s last King’s panto for three years.

“Thankfully, Edinburgh wanted me back,” he adds. He returned last year in Jack and the Beanstalk.

As he slips on Buttons’ famous bell-boy uniform, the actor admits that, despite now being one of Scotland’s “panto legends”, he still gets nervous before going on.

“You get nervous about the gags. By the time you open, you have heard them so often you are going, ‘is this at all funny?’. Now the show is bedded in I can go on and enjoy it.”

In Paul Elliott’s new take on the age-old fairytale, Buttons has been transformed from Cinderella’s infatuated best friend into the family’s paternal old retainer.