Eastbourne's Snow White is Georgie's professional panto debut

Running from December 6-January 12, the show is the 23rd pantomime from the Devonshire Park Theatre team. Tickets are priced from £13. Call the box office on 01323 412000 or online at www.eastbournetheatres.co.uk.

“This is my first proper panto,” Georgie says. “I used to do them when I was little from the age of five to 11. I was in the juvenile ensemble in the Sevenoaks panto, and that's how I started off with my dancing.”

Helping Georgie now is the fact that last year she went on an arena tour with Boy George in Peter Pan The Arena Spectacular: “It was almost like a panto but on a much larger scale and we toured from October last year to January this year. We went to Blackpool and Liverpool and Aberdeen and Glasgow and Birmingham and a couple of other places and we ended up in London. Boy George is such a lovely man. He's very, very down to earth. It was lovely to perform with him on tour. You get worried about having a major celebrity in panto but he was really great. It was an amazing experience. But this Christmas it is going to be really lovely to be in one place and not have to travel all over the country left right and centre!”

As for the role of Snow White: “Well, I don't look a lot like Snow White. I've got brown hair but she can be my alter ego for Christmas! She's got to be lovely. I've done a lot of research watching the film and practising my lines. And I think she's just got to be the perfect Princess. You have got to be very kind and slightly witty and you can't be too beige. You've got to have something about you. You've got to have a lot of consideration for other people and you've got to be very friendly and smiling bubbly and joyous.

“But you’ve got to remember that it is a dark journey. The show is about showing the journey and the journey is very important for Snow White. You see her at the beginning and you see how she is being manipulated and then she gets lost in the woods and meets her dwarves and kind of has a family again and then she gets tricked by the witch but then she marries her prince. She gets to fall in love with her prince quite early.”

It's a wonderfully convenient panto for Georgie: “My family are based in Mayfield. Originally we were more from the Tonbridge area but we have lived in Mayfield quite a few years now and then I went off to do my training at Bird College in Sidcup.”

Georgie completed her training in 2020 which means of course that she started amid the pandemic: “It was all horrendously affected by the pandemic. It was a very, very strange transition from secondary school to university life. The first year we were on zoom and we would be dancing in our own living rooms and having 9am singing lessons in our student flats. And then once we got back into college it was still strange. You had to act with a mask on and you had to dance in boxes taped on the floor. You had to do everything from the box and even act with the person in the next box without getting close.

“But I think it taught us resilience and I know that I will never take anything for granted now because we had it all taken away from us. There is resentment because we had to pay a lot to do our training in a box and online. I didn't even finish school and I never completed my A levels but I already had my place at college before Covid hit so I was not as affected as many of my other classmates. I think you have just got to take the positives from it and learn from it.”