Robin Hood Pantomime Characters: A Complete Guide

We rounded up every Robin Hood pantomime character, from Wilma Scarlet to the Sheriff of Nottingham, so directors know exactly who they're casting and what each one brings to the stage.

If you're weighing up the Robin Hood pantomime characters against other versions of this story, ours makes one clear structural choice: the hero is already good and already capable, so the comedy and the jeopardy both have to come from everyone around him. That means an outlaw Dame who's secretly the most organised person in the forest, a Sheriff undone by his own mother, and four Outlaws who are all, somewhat unhelpfully, named John. Here's who you'll be casting.

Robin Hood and Maid Marian

Robin arrives exactly as tradition demands, charming, generous and entirely unbothered by his own reputation. Marian sums him up within a minute: 'charming, dashing, generous... arrogant, reckless, in love with yourself', to which his only defence is that he 'just happens to appreciate the view' when he passes a mirror. She's arrived in Nottingham incognito to escape exactly this kind of performance, and gets it anyway, first from the court she left behind, then from Robin himself. Their scene in the woods, where insults slowly turn into something warmer, is the show's real hinge: by Act Two it's Marian's own speech about seeing past his 'bravado and self-adulation' that talks the Outlaws into the rescue.

Dame Wilma Scarlet

Robin Hood doesn't carry the same fixed Dame convention that Aladdin or Dick Whittington do, so Wilma Scarlet is very much our own invention rather than a name we inherited. We gave her a double job, Outlaw and 'regional coordinator for the Sherwood Forest Girl Guides', which does real work later: her Girl Guide contacts are what actually get Robin out of the dungeon. Her running joke, that she's more capable than anyone gives her credit for, sets up the audience's own call and response ('That doesn't look right... See it, say it, sorted!') and pays off properly when her trolley of supplies turns out to hold exactly what a rescue needs.

The Sheriff of Nottingham

The Sheriff is one of the few genuinely fixed points in Robin Hood tradition, and we've kept him there, but built his defeat around romantic humiliation rather than pure comeuppance. His fixation on Marian, his disastrous Love Potion scheme, which ends up dosing Wilma, Bluff and Blunder instead of its intended target, and his own mother turning up mid-villainy with sandwiches all chip away at his authority well before King Richard formally sentences him. A tyrant who still gets sent to his room by his mother is never quite as frightening as he thinks he is, which is rather the point.

The Spirit of Sherwood

Our storytelling device, addressing the audience directly in rhyming couplets to keep the plot moving, and occasionally undercutting her own rhymes and making up brand new words ('Are brimming with cheer and full of... Applaudience!'). A rhyming guide figure who bridges scenes this way is a device we come back to across the catalogue in different forms, closer here to a cheerful narrator than a solemn one, in the mould of Fairy Sparkles in Cinderella.

Bluff and Blunder

The Sheriff's henchmen are a straightforward double act built on shared incompetence, from the bottomless tax bucket in Scene One to falling in love with Wilma via the wrong tray of tea. Giving the villain a hapless pair rather than a single sidekick is a device we return to right across the catalogue: Grabbit and Runn chase Baron Hardup's debts in Cinderella, Slip and Slap serve Octavia in The Little Mermaid, and Drip and Dribble do Gothel's bidding in Rapunzel. What sets Bluff and Blunder apart is the Act Two handcuff sequence, where their incompetence becomes the actual mechanism of Robin's escape rather than just a source of jokes at the edges of the plot.

Alan-a-Dale and Eleanor Dale

Alan and Eleanor open the show as the audience's way in, welcoming everyone to Nottingham before Robin or Marian even appear. Alan's place in Robin's gang and Eleanor's fast friendship with Marian connect every other group in the show, Outlaws, townsfolk and royalty, without either of them needing a subplot of their own. Sibling pairs like this run through several of our scripts, Simon Trot backs up Jack in Jack and the Beanstalk, and Sally and Simon do the same for Dame Babs in Snow White.

Friar Tuck and the Four Johns

Friar Tuck and Little John are both part of the wider Robin Hood tradition, and we've kept them, while building extra comedy around the edges of each. Tuck arrives with a new rolled-up poster in nearly every scene he's in, each one worse than the last, and his dry asides ('That's how nuns start') give him more presence than a purely functional messenger role usually gets. Little John, meanwhile, has grown into a comic quartet: Big John, Medium John ('taller than Little John, shorter than Big John') and Not John, whose entire joke is that he isn't called John at all. They arrive as 'The Four Johns of the Apocalypse' on hobby horses, crash offstage almost immediately, and exit the plot just as fast, a lean, disposable gag that doesn't need much stage time to land.

Mum, Brown Owl and Snowy Owl

Mum undercuts the Sheriff's villainy every time she appears with a tray and a scolding, and her running gag, that a proper cup of tea fixes everything, including a Love Potion, gives her more plot function than a comic parent usually gets. Brown Owl and Snowy Owl run the Girl Guides with the discipline the Outlaws entirely lack, and their kitchen-drawer motivational speech ('you have to BUCKLE up... get on BOARD... and stick to your GUNS') is one of the script's best-built set pieces, turning ordinary props into the punchline one at a time.

Janet the Jailor and King Richard

Janet is a gentle subversion of the frail-old-lady stereotype: she has Robin in a headlock within seconds of meeting him, and her out-of-tune recorder becomes a genuine plot device rather than a one-off gag, summoning the Girl Guides to the rescue when it's played in anger. King Richard appears only in the closing scenes, but his arrival resolves the Sheriff's fate in one line and supplies the finale's last, very silly Love Potion mix-up of his own.

Casting the Robin Hood Pantomime Characters: Who It Suits

Between the Outlaws' camp and Nottingham Castle, this script has 19 named roles, plus a flexible Ensemble of Townsfolk, Outlaws, Girl Guides, Archers, Guards and Ghosts, which puts it among our Large Cast scripts. 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 or visit the Robin Hood script page for the full synopsis and details.