NATIVITY PLAYS:IT IS THE kind of theory that might make it into Malcolm Gladwell's next book. If you played one half of the donkey in your Christmas nativity play, do you spend the rest of your life striving for a leading role? Did Bill Gates play Joseph or the third tree from the left?, writes Catherine Cleary
But perhaps the nativity play is above all that. Maybe it's the last gasp of innocence before life's struggle to succeed begins; a purer kind of Stars in Their Eyes.
It is the season of children in tea towels, gloriously off-key renditions of Silent Nightand misty-eyed parents recording every fluffed line and dropped shepherd's staff. In a world where powerful reputations are built on cruel reviews, the nativity play still pulls adoring audiences who will forgive everything, even the occasional tussle over the crib.
There will be non-denominational concerts in crèches and schools around the land this week. One friend's son has been crooning the lyrics to Amarillothese past few weeks in preparation. And the nativity may have been tweaked to include a couple of credit crunch jokes, but in many cases a traditional Christian story will be told. There will be shepherds, kings, angels, an innkeeper or two, and a serious-faced Mary and Joseph who look like they carry the weight of the world on their young shoulders. In the end, a Baby Annabell in swaddling clothes is adored in a makeshift manger and everyone goes home happy.
Some of us remember our own nativity roles, though not everyone has a nativity play in their memory bank. "Maybe it was a bad experience and I blocked it out of my mind, but I'm pretty sure I didn't," The Last Wordpresenter Matt Cooper said when asked if he had ever played a role in a school nativity play. As father of five children, he has since been that parent in the audience several times.
Stand-up comic Jarlath Regan also remembers "never having a starring role. I was a kind of backing singer in Ballymanny Church in Newbridge and whatever lack of oxygen took over me, I can remember vomiting during the nativity play. Maybe that was the plea for attention. Maybe my brain just wanted all eyes on me and said, 'I've got to be the centre of attention'."
The son of a friend of Regan's was cast as an innkeeper in his play and he "had it in his head that the innkeeper was a big role." So his Dad talked to him patiently about the importance of the innkeeper role in the nativity story, despite the limited dialogue that it involved. On the night, the boy opened the door to a tired Mary and Joseph and answered the question about room at the inn with a cheery, "Yes, there's loads. Come on in." "It was just fabulous." Regan says he could get a comedy sketch out of how a four year-old's bid for a bigger role changes the whole course of Christian history. "And then Mary ordered room service and more towels . . ."
His fiancée Tina has lined him up to be Santa Claus at the Montessori school where she is a teacher. "She has prepared me for the mayhem that ensues when Santa walks in. It's a bit like an Asian Michael Jackson concert circa 1988. Some of the children start crying, others stay completely silent, and I've got to be so careful what I say because there's a total fear of Santa and the power that he has to make a successful Christmas."
Regan's stand-up routine contains a joke about how it is possible to get away with saying the cruelest things if you always follow it up with a genial "ho, ho, ho."
Down in the Four Courts, senior counsel Ercus Stewart dimly remembers an appearance in white robes as an angel at his nativity play during his days in primary school in Dublin's Eccles Street. There was much excitement and trepidation in the run-up to the event and in later years in the Christian Brothers-run Coláiste Mhuire he remembers the annual Glór Réim concert. "They ran a much more exciting pageant and play every year."
In UCD he joined not Dramsoc but the Irish equivalent, "primarily to keep practising my Irish," and played a number of fairly unremarkable stage roles. "They never really discovered I was Brad Pitt. But I know I am."
Does he enjoy the element of performance that goes with the life of a barrister?
"Well, there is an element of performance, more so if you're before a jury, and a huge amount of the younger barristers do enjoy the performance, but I'm too old and boring to be thinking about it now. It does a huge service for your ego, but it doesn't always do a great service for your client."
Comedian Dermot Whelan is looking forward to his first nativity play experience as a parent when his two-and-a-half-year-old son Owen takes to the stage as a star - that's "a star" not "the star", a subtle difference in the world of nativities. In the "little school in Limerick" which Whelan attended as a child, he remembers his nativity play as his first experience of the opposite of early stand-up comedy, a sort of stand-up tragedy. Wearing a tea towel on his head - "so he must have been a shepherd" - he informed all the other four-year-olds that their mammies had all gone home. "Everyone started screaming. Maybe it was resentment at not being given a bigger part. Maybe I thought by breaking everyone down I would get the lead."
His son's performance in Fairview may be captured on camera, but he admits he and Owen's mother have a poor record on remembering to bring the camera, or put in working batteries. Their son's childhood is mainly recorded in "an emotional memory bank". He is looking forward to the mayhem of it all. "I like the lawlessness of it. It's like the improvisation sessions we do. Anything can happen at any moment."
At Divine Word National School in Marley Grange, Rathfarnham in Dublin 16, the principal, John Williams, explains how teachers try to make the play interesting every year. The nativity play he's been doing "since the year dot" started to take a slightly alternative route two or three years ago. Last year the story was told like a TV news report, "And now over to our reporter on the ground in Bethlehem . . ." and the emphasis is on music and songs, although it's more Oliver than High School Musical. "They're not hymns anymore. They're songs."
Both teachers and children get great enjoyment from the preparations and the performance, he explains. "Children, naturally enough, are performers. Sometimes you will be doing the dress rehearsal and wonder if they're going to be able to pull it off, but on the night they are invariably just fantastic. We do it in the church and the altar is part of the stage, so it does get back to the idea of the real meaning of Christmas. Having said that, we have children in the school who are not Christian and they take part."
And how do teachers handle the delicate business of casting lead roles? "There are always going to be a few who want to push themselves forward, but then you often have other kids suggesting someone for a part. Even the people bringing scenery on and off enjoy it and take their jobs very seriously."
One of the benefits of alternative scripts is the large number of roles. (There are some 15 angels in this year's production.) and for that reason "we don't have people playing trees," Williams says. The two fifth classes in the school always get to do the play. This year fifth class teacher Kevin Healy went to the Veritas shop and looked through about 20 nativity scripts until he found the perfect one. Angels Up High takes a look at the story through the eyes of a group of angelic but sometimes unruly angels.
"This year we decided to go for something with lots of parts. So we have 40 to 50 speaking parts." The play is "very funny and the music is gorgeous," Healy says.
He has never been asked by a parent to cast their child in a lead role. "They wouldn't be involved that much." Rehearsals start in December. "We're not like the shops, we don't start as soon as Hallowe'en is over." There is always "huge excitement" on the night and the church is "packed to the rafters", with parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles, past pupils, friends and neighbours.
Actress Donna Dent is playing Sally Brass in the Gate's production of Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop. Perhaps fuelled by recession sentiments about lending institutions, audiences have been booing Quilp, the moneylender, and his croneys, with the vigour of a panto crowd.
As a 10-year-old child in national school in Clonshaugh, Dent had an unusual alternative nativity role. Her school staged a production of long-running RTÉ soap The Riordans, in which she played Minnie, the neighbourhood nosey-parker. The cast stood on stage "completely ad-libbing" and she was dressed "in an old lady mac, hair all done up in a woolly hat. Then there was a moment when nobody was saying anything and nobody knew what to do. So I remember I just stood there and said, 'Mary, your cups are very dirty'. "
The desire to act felt like a pipe dream in a world where everyone left school and got a job, Dent says.
"But whenever there was anything going on in school plays, I wanted to be involved." In fifth year, she played Captain Von Trapp in the school's Christmas production of The Sound of Music. "I was too tall to be Maria and I deliberately read badly for Max, so I was thrilled to get the part."
She still remembers when the curtain went up and she stood there with a whistle, her hair French-braided, "to make me look manly", ready to call the Von Trapp children to order. "There was huge excitement and we seemed to rehearse for what felt like weeks and weeks. It absolutely consumed everything in my head and I could think of nothing else." An Evening Press photograph of the cast still exists in her collection of school photographs, and it was a "hugely bonding experience". She is still friends with the girls involved. "The girl who played the Baroness went on to teach drama, and we met up recently. I have a little boy and she has two and we just spent hours talking about drama and about teaching it to children."