Happy return to Portsmouth panto venue for Edward

Sleeping Beauty will run from December 9-31 with signed and relaxed performances. Tickets ranging from £10 to £22.50 can be booked online or by calling the box office on 02392 649000.

“Last year was brilliant,” Edward says. “It was Cinderella and it was a fantastic production and my family came to see it and they said that it was the best panto they had ever seen. It had all the right ingredients, a lovely company, a lovely crew and the theatre itself is very beautiful. The theatre here is just perfect for panto. It really is a beautiful grand Victorian theatre and it's just glorious especially as it still feels very intimate as well.”

Edward lives not so far away in Lee on Solent but he is actually Swedish by birth and grew up in South Africa.

“I was mainly in Johannesburg from 76 to 95 for 20 years also but I played in Cape Town and Durban and Pretoria.

"It was a lovely place to start my career in South Africa and I had a lot of good opportunities but then I moved across. It was around the time of a lot of changes of government and so on in South Africa and there were so many important things that were requiring funding and the arts were perhaps going to be the thing that got pushed to the bottom of the pile. There were so many other things that needed fixing in South Africa and so like so many actors I had to emigrate in order to be able to find work.

“It was strange for me to come across. I had to start again completely but more recently I took my family to New York. We lived there for five years but there comes a point I think when you just need an experience of a different life, and I love living down here. I'm so happy that we came back from New York. There are many great things about being in New York but I actually felt that it was robbing my children of their childhood. When you're in the concrete jungle, it is great in many ways but it is also hard work and it is also tiring. I wanted my children to have a proper childhood.”

Panto exists in South Africa: “There are lots of British traditions in South Africa, some of them good, some of them not so good and there is panto over there but I never actually did it in South Africa. I didn't do panto until I came over and actually my first panto was also with Jordan Productions (who are also doing Sleeping Beauty in Portsmouth this year). It was in 95-96 at Southampton Mayflower with John Inman and Britt Ekland, a fellow Swede!

“And then there was about 15 years when I didn't do panto at all and then last year was my first time coming back. And it felt like just slipping into a lovely comfy chair again. Panto is hard work, but it is fun and generally speaking you are with a great bunch of people.”