Dick Whittington Pantomime Characters: A Complete Guide

If you're weighing up the Dick Whittington pantomime characters against other versions of this story, the real difference here is a cat who actually gets to talk. In most tellings Eileen would stay silent throughout; ours gives her a voice, and many of the script's best lines along with it. Here's who you'll be casting.

Dick Whittington and Alice Fitzwarren

The bones of this story are genuinely old. The real Richard Whittington married a woman named Alice Fitzwarren, and the "streets paved with gold" legend that sends a poor lad to London, cat in tow, dates back to at least the early 1600s. Our script follows that shape closely: Dick leaves the fictional village of Tiny Tiddlington, falls for Alice within his first scene in the city, and eventually clears his name to become Lord Mayor.

Where we've had our own fun is in the ending. Rather than the Alderman simply granting his daughter's hand, he stops himself and tells Dick 'it's not the old days, you need to ask her, not me', handing the actual proposal to Alice's own choice rather than her father's permission. It's a small structural decision, not something tradition hands you.

The comic engine of their courtship is Dick's escalating compliments ('you're beautiful... beautiful, incredible, gorgeous and absolutely stunning') and the audience-participation hunt for Eileen, who keeps appearing and vanishing right behind them. Both need a cast who won't rush the audience's replies.

Sarah the Cook

Sarah the Cook has been the Dame in this story since the earliest recorded productions, sometimes as Dame Durden, but Sarah the Cook is the name that's stuck. Ours, Sarah Snafflebratt, sits squarely inside that tradition while expanding it from cook into full restaurateur, which gives her a much bigger stage than the role usually gets.

Her running gag with the audience, 'Coo-ee!' answered with 'Show us your sausages!', recurs right across the script and should be rehearsed as a proper callback, not a one-off bit. The same three-instance escalating structure shows up in her international menu list, delivered once at normal speed, once faster, once faster still, always landing on 'we're out of Yorkshire puddings'. Giving the Dame an actual trade to run, rather than just a household to manage, is a device that recurs elsewhere in the catalogue too, alongside Dame Trot's dairy in Jack and the Beanstalk and Dame Betty Beehive's salon in Rapunzel.

Idle Jack

'Idle Jack' is one of the most fixed comic names in the whole Dick Whittington tradition, Sarah's lazy son, and ours plays it dead straight. He falls asleep mid-sentence, rolls off his cart, and gets caught out twice by a running "there's no catch" gag with a ball thrown at him from the wings. He's a smaller part than Dick or Sarah in terms of stage time, but a good Jack needs sharp physical comedy timing rather than lines, so cast for that rather than presence alone.

King Rat, Frank and Sammy

King Rat as villain is fixed by tradition, and ours matches it exactly. What's distinctively ours is the pathos underneath the menace: his tragic backstory, in which a cat named Julie ate his parents while he waited for her at the park, turns his hatred of cats into something almost sympathetic before immediately undercutting it with a joke. It's worth playing that beat for real feeling before the punchline lands.

Frank and Sammy, his hench-rats, are a genuine double act rather than interchangeable villain muscle, forever wanting to sing and forever getting shut down, until Fairy Bow-Bells reforms them at the end and sends them off to join a jazz club instead. A henchman duo working for a single villain is a device we come back to across the catalogue: Bluff and Blunder do the same job for the Sheriff in Robin Hood, and Drip and Dribble do it for Gothel in Rapunzel. Give the villain a double act rather than a lone sidekick, and the comedy has somewhere to bounce between two performers instead of landing on one.

Eileen and Fairy Bow-Bells

Eileen isn't handed to you by tradition the way Sarah or King Rat are. In most versions of this story the cat stays a cat; ours gives her a voice, a personality, and the negotiation that ends the whole plot. The spell that lets her speak, cast by Fairy Bow-Bells and tied to staying on the road to London, is entirely our own invention, worth flagging clearly rather than assuming an audience already expects a talking cat here. Once she can talk, Eileen does real narrative work: she single-handedly defeats the Rat Pack offstage, then talks King Rat down at the climax with a straightforward 'cat to rat' peace offer built entirely on cheese. She needs an actor confident enough to hold the stage alone during that scene.

Fairy Bow-Bells is where the name itself is the tradition. In the genuine London legend, it's the bells of Bow Church that ring out 'turn again, Whittington' and call Dick back to the city, and 'Fairy Bow-Bells' is the long-established pantomime solution for turning that bit of folklore into a character. She sits in the same guide-and-helper role as Jean the Genie in Aladdin and Fairy Haricot in Jack and the Beanstalk, closer to a fond nudge in the right direction than a solemn fairy godmother figure.

Alderman Fitzwarren, Captain Watt and Sultan Pepper

Alderman Fitzwarren, Alice's father and the council leader, carries the story's authority figure role and its subplot: he's the one taken in by King Rat's necklace frame-up, and the one who has to admit he was wrong. Captain Watt has no fixed traditional name (the ship's captain has always been a blank slate for panto writers to fill however they like), and ours leans into a "Who's on First"-style crossed-wires routine built entirely on his own name, then leads the mop drill in Scene Eight, a physical set-piece worth rehearsing separately for timing. Sultan Pepper is a smaller role confined to Act Two, mostly there to be menaced by King Rat and rescued at the end, so it can comfortably double with an ensemble track on a tighter cast.

Casting the Dick Whittington Pantomime Characters: Who It Suits

At 12 named principal roles, plus a flexible Ensemble of townsfolk, sailors, rats and pest controllers, this sits in our Medium cast band. If you're weighing it up against the rest of the catalogue, our full range of pantomime scripts is worth a browse too.

If this cast list sounds like a good fit for your group, request a free Perusal Script for Dick Whittington or visit the Dick Whittington script page for the full synopsis and details.