THE NATIVITY
POST-NATAL…
Well. So much for that, then. And let it be said loud & clear: had I had even an inkling of the wear & tear on the joint Jones/Semple soul, I would have nipped the notion in the bud with all the thoroughness of a Herod dispatching the babes of Bethlehem. It all worked, but at a cost.
I’m sitting here at the desk at home at 12.25pm whilst 500 yards away in the Theatre someone is covering my lessons. I had to leave a lesson yesterday afternoon with violent chest pains. They came on very suddenly & continued spasmodically until I went to bed at 11-ish. The school nurse has arranged for me to see the doctor on her weekly visit at 4.00 today & she in turn will fix up a referral to the local hospital for tests.
I’ve had these pains for years, way back before the onset of middle age, but hitherto they’ve always passed within an hour or so. They’re never accompanied by other signs of cardiac distress – sweating, nausea, breathlessness – but they are incapacitating when they occur. I’m assuming they’re due to stress, which can engender some of the symptoms of heart disorder. But this time I shall readily attach myself to whatever machinery the surgeon wheels in: this was an alarming experience &, at this particular juncture of the life cycle, I’m inclined to take out a bit of insurance…
PRE-NATAL…
The technical rehearsal on the Saturday before the week of the performances was a shambles. With St Mary’s Church littered with cables, the pews still in place & God’s tower still being raised, my attempts to push & pull 11 plays up & down the aisle were doomed from the start. Additionally, it was cripplingly cold &, for all their enormous patience, wrapped in their duvets & blankets like refugees waiting for the next train, the cast was experiencing the first stages of collective hypothermia.
I drove them all home through the dark of a winter’s evening, wondering by what prodigies of effort we might salvage the production. With no major rehearsals lined up until Tuesday’s dress, the situation looked bleak. The rehearsal on Tuesday was due to start at 10.00 am with further technical work. In fact, just about all the lighting & music cues, prop setting, scene setting & striking, costume try-outs & entrance & exit practise would have to be fitted into the day’s schedule, eliminating any possibility of a run-through prior to the dress. It would mean working virtually non-stop up to 6.00 pm when the rest of the musicians were due to turn up. With a 7.00 pm start to the dress essential, our sound man would have just enough time to cobble together some sort of a balance.
So that’s what we did. Going through each play consecutively we inserted lighting cues, frantically re-rigging in mid-scene when problems occurred, guessing most of the time because of daylight filtering in through the mediaeval glass, bleaching out even the powerful Sil 30s. We timed the precise length of musical numbers with the keyboard having to substitute for virtually all the other instruments, the dancers learning their cues from the first few bars. We practised all the entrances & exits & the movements of actors from one area to another via the side aisles. We tested the acoustics, finding that they varied wildly in different parts of the nave & having to adjust accordingly. And, as 5.00 pm came & went, we edged closer to the final stages of the play. As the daylight faded, the long throw of the Sil 30s on their T-bars at the far end of the aisle picked out the top of God’s tower & from it shone back the pair of Cantatas illuminating the aisle. Up came the two gobos on the Pattern 23s projected onto the arch framing the tower, one of the sun, the other of the moon. As I herded the soldiers up the aisle towards the frozen tableau of the mothers, the rest of the band crept in & set up. At 7.15 we started the dress run &, as I played the bass-line to the dance tune Down the Road that opened & closed the whole production, I tried to step back & let it go to the actors & the stage crew to whom it now belonged.
As dresses went it hung together remarkably well. The proximity of the day’s intensive rehearsing – we only finished 10 minutes before the dress began – kept both memory & momentum in place. And because of the unflagging will & energy of cast & crew we completed 12 hours of virtually non-stop rehearsal in good order. As the band played Down the Road to wind up the proceedings, we all knew that, for all the gaps & cracks, we had reached first base. For the very first time I actually began to look forward to sharing The Nativity with an audience.
NATAL…
I never feel any sense of triumph as a production runs successfully. All I can see & hear are late lighting cues, lines blown, momentary dries, fudged exits. As each evening passes & the performance unfolds before me, I cover my script with upper case notes framed in scribbled circles & punctuated with violent trios of exclamation marks. As I sat with the band during the four nights of The Nativity, guitarist Graeme inscrutable on my right, Chris the drummer chortling behind me, I planned new versions of virtually every major set piece, knowing that I would never attempt to actually inflict them on my long-suffering cast.
Unsurprisingly, Saturday night’s was our best performance. With great patience, Graeme (who reckoned that this was close to his 400th rendition of the music to the show) had ironed out the imprecisions within the band &, in our ramshackle way, we steamed through the songs & dances with real passion.
But how to characterise the performances? Having for several weeks now taxed you all (apart from my long-distance, remote-imaging audience, Kate & Karen) with accounts of growing neurosis as the Nativity balloon expanded & threatened to burst, I’m reluctant to prolong the process. I can’t remember whether it was Samuel Beckett or Jack Kerouac who coined the term ‘thought-bursts’ to describe the recording of the rapid sequencing of fragmented impressions, but I guess a few thought-bursts may best communicate the rolling & tumbling of a production in full flow…
- The twin Sill 30s opening up to reveal God leaning out over the top rail of the tower. Mario’s orator’s voice booming out between the pillars & beneath the wooden vaulting – “Ego sum Alpha et Omega...!”
- Ayla leaning way out of the tower & bawling in Lucifer’s pride, “The beams of my brighthood are bigged with the best..!”
- Adam & Eve, in their ‘naked’ suits (full-length unitards) emerging from the body of the tower & passing through the golden ribbon curtain dangling from the maypole…
- The single swooping movement with which Cain seized Abel & the cutting of his throat that had two rows of audience gasping out loud…
- The final stages of the preparations for the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham, the impact massively intensified by the actors & I having cut the clumsily-written play to ribbons to create & sustain theatrical impact…
- The pouring into the aisle of the ‘animals’, each carrying a block that would slide alongside its neighbour to create the Ark. The two ranks of umbrellas that, when opened, created the hull of the vessel, an idea that I lifted shamelessly from the original production. The band playing Dylan’s ‘When the Ship Comes In’ as Noah, his wife & the massed umbrellas sway in the floods that cover the earth…
- Nick’s Joseph in anguish at the provenance of the baby that his virgin wife is bearing. The extraordinary sophistication of the writing by this anonymous amateur scribe, a member of the Shipwrights’, Fishers’ & Mariners’ Guild, its style simultaneously humorous & poignant. Mary throwing her arms wide in forgiveness after Gabriel has straightened Joseph out…
- Richard’s bombastic Herod, aggressive yet paranoid, haranguing the audience, shadowed by his bespectacled, nerd like son, played by Chay…
- The extraordinary Shepherds’ Play, held up by scholars as one of the finest examples of mediaeval theatre – so much so that its anonymous author is always referred to as the Wakefield Master. Our 3 Shepherds – Ayla, Megan & Tim – pursuing the sheep-stealer Mak (my department colleague Roz) in a breakneck chase more Keystone Cops than 14th century low comedy… The astonishing blasphemies implicit in the paralleling of the Nativity in the concealing of the stolen sheep in Mak’s wife’s crib…
- The 3 Kings, led by Camille curling off the archaic English vowels & consonants with their tyrannical assonance & alliteration in her glorious French accent…
- The Massacre of the Innocents. The soldiers marching down the aisle towards the frozen group of mothers; the gathering around them; the plunging of the 9’ long spears into the group; the twist & turn to reveal the babies dangling from the spear tips…
- And, as I watched the dreamlike rising & falling gait of Herod & his soldiers exiting hand-in-hand up the aisle & into the chancel, led by Death with his scythe, I recognised with a strange chill a hitherto unconscious synchronicity between this my last production & the first that I ever staged nearly 30 years before. In the hubris & ignorance of a young teacher wanting to impress (but even more wanting to conceal the fact that he had never directed a stage show before), I put on a version of Ingmar Bergmann’s The Seventh Seal adapted from the film script by myself. At its conclusion I had Death leading out The Knight, The Squire & The Players in a live version of that most famous of sequences, the dancing exit to the dark lands across the hilltop. I had forgotten completely how I’d ended that production. Part-solemn & poetic, but, I assure you, mainly self-mocking, I murmured, “As ye entered, so shall ye pass…”
A video was shot & it’s being transferred to DVD. It won’t be anything like professional quality, but it will provide all involved with some account of the show. Photos there are too, but I shan’t collect them until I’m back at school. So we’re just a few pics away from the end of the saga. For which relief I shall be enormously grateful.
4:51:39 PM 
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