theatre – Dan Q

God’s Adviser

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Of all the discussions I’ve ever been involved with on the subject of religion, the one I’m proudest of was perhaps also one of the earliest.

Let me tell you about a time that, as an infant, I got sent out of my classroom because I wouldn’t stop questioning the theological ramifications of our school nativity play.

I’m aware that I’ve got readers from around the world, and Christmas traditions vary, so let’s start with a primer. Here in the UK, it’s common¹ at the end of the school term before Christmas for primary schools to put on a “nativity play”. A group of infant pupils act out an interpretation of the biblical story of the birth of Jesus: a handful of 5/6-year-olds playing the key parts of, for example, Mary, Joseph, an innkeeper, some angels, maybe a donkey, some wise men, some shepherds, and what-have-you.

A group of children dressed as Mary, Joseph, shepherds, kings, angels, and a variety of barn animals crowd a stage. — Maybe they’re just higher-budget nowadays, or maybe I grew up in a more-deprived area, but I’m pretty sure than when I was a child a costume consisted mostly of a bedsheet if you were an angel, a tea-towel secured with an elastic band if you were a shepherd, a cardboard crown if you were a king, and so on. Photo courtesy Ian Turk.

As with all theatre performed by young children, a nativity play straddles the line between adorable and unbearable. Somehow, the innkeeper – who only has one line – forgets to say “there is no room at the inn” and so it looks like Mary and Joseph just elect to stay in the barn, one of the angels wets herself in the middle of a chorus, and Mary, bored of sitting in the background having run out of things to do, idly swings the saviour of mankind round and around, holding him by his toe. It’s beautiful².

I was definitely in a couple of different nativity plays as a young child, but one in particular stands out in my memory.

Dan, as a young child, superimposed against a background with a star, with a speech bubble reading 'Hark! A star! In the East!' — “Let us go now to Bethlehem. The son of God is born today.”

In order to put a different spin on the story of the first Christmas³, one year my school decided to tell a different, adjacent story. Here’s a summary of the key beats of the plot, as I remember it:

God is going to send His only son to Earth and wants to advertise His coming.
“What kind of marker can he put in the sky to lead people to the holy infant’s birthplace?”, He wonders.
So He auditions a series of different natural phenomena:
- The first candidate is a cloud, but its pitch is rejected because… I don’t remember: it’ll blow away or something.
- Another candidate was a rainbow, but it was clearly derivative of an earlier story, perhaps.
- After a few options, eventually God settles on a star. Hurrah!
Some angels go put the star in the right place, shepherds and wise men go visit Mary and her family, and all that jazz.

So far, totally on-brand for a primary school nativity play but with 50% more imagination than the average. Nice.

Edited watercolour of magi crossing a desert on camels, with a large meteor inserted into the sky. — What the Meteor Strike of Bethlehem lacked in longevity, it made up for in earth-shattering destruction.

I was cast as Adviser #1, and that’s where things started to go wrong.

The part of God was played by my friend Daniel, but clearly our teacher figured that he wouldn’t be able to remember all of his lines⁴ and expanded his role into three: God, Adviser #1, and Adviser #2. After each natural phenomenon explained why it would be the best, Adviser #1 and Adviser #2 would each say a few words about the candidate’s pros and cons, providing God with the information He needed to make a decision.

To my young brain, this seemed theologically absurd. Why would God need an adviser?⁵

“If He’s supposed to be omniscient, why does God need an adviser, let alone two?” I asked my teacher⁶.

The answer was, of course, that while God might be capable of anything… if the kid playing Him managed to remember all of his lines then that’d really be a miracle. But I’d interrupted rehearsals for my question and my teacher Mrs. Doyle clearly didn’t want to explain that in front of the class.

But I wouldn’t let it go:

“But Miss, are we saying that God could make mistakes?”
“Couldn’t God try out the cloud and the rainbow and just go back in time when He knows which one works?”
“Why does God send an angel to tell the shepherds where to go but won’t do that for the kings?”
“Miss, don’t the stars move across the sky each night? Wouldn’t everybody be asking questions about the bright one that doesn’t?”
“Hang on, what’s supposed to have happened to the Star of Bethlehem after God was done with it? Did it have planets? Did those planets… have life?”

In the end I had to be thrown out of class. I spent the rest of that rehearsal standing in the corridor.

And it was totally worth it for this anecdote.

Footnotes

¹ I looked around to see if the primary school nativity play was still common, or if the continuing practice at my kids’ school shows that I’m living in a bubble, but the only source I could find was a 2007 news story that claims that nativity plays are “under threat”… by The Telegraph, who I’d expect to write such a story after, I don’t know, the editor’s kids decided to put on a slightly-more-secular play one year. Let’s just continue to say that the school nativity play is common in the UK, because I can’t find any reliable evidence to the contrary.

² I’ve worked onstage and backstage on a variety of productions, and I have nothing but respect for any teacher who, on top of their regular workload and despite being unjustifiably underpaid, volunteers to put on a nativity play. I genuinely believe that the kids get a huge amount out of it, but man it looks like a monumental amount of work.

³ And, presumably, spare the poor parents who by now had potentially seen children’s amateur dramatics interpretations of the same story several times already.

⁴ Our teacher was probably correct.

⁵ In hindsight, my objection to this scripting decision might actually have been masking an objection to the casting decision. I wanted to play God!

⁶ I might not have used the word “omniscient”, because I probably didn’t know the word yet. But I knew the concept, and I certainly knew that my teacher was on spiritually-shaky ground to claim both that God knew everything and God needed an advisor.

Heaven Can Wait

Harry Segell’s 1938 play Heaven Can Wait went on to inspire such an extraordinarily long legacy of follow-ups.

I’ve only seen the most-recent few and my experience is that the older iterations are better, so I probably ought to watch Here Comes Mr. Jordan, right?

The Poetics of Empire

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

The Poetics of Empire (Lewton Bus)

Pop quiz: In your typical James Bond movie, who is the protagonist?
Seems like a strange, obvious question, right? It’s obviously Bond. He’s the hero. He’s played by the top-billed actor. The franchise is basically named after him. So, clearly, Bond is the protagonist. Right?
Put a pin in that…

Pop quiz: In your typical James Bond movie, who is the protagonist?

Seems like a strange, obvious question, right? It’s obviously Bond. He’s the hero. He’s played by the top-billed actor. The franchise is basically named after him. So, clearly, Bond is the protagonist. Right?

Put a pin in that, and we’ll come back to it.

Now, here’s a similar question: In the new Avengers: Infinity War, who is the protagonist?

…

Brannon Moore (Lewton Bus)

This article mirrors almost-exactly the conversation that Ruth and I had coming out of the cimena after seeing Infinity War the other week.

Etiquette

On Tuesday last week, Ruth and I went to Etiquette, an unusual (and at least a little experimental) theatrical experience at the Oxford Playhouse. I say “theatrical experience”, because while there were certainly elements to the evening that could be considered to be reminiscent of more-conventional theatre, it was far more like not going to see a play than it was like doing so.

The event takes place in a café. And I mean that literally… I’m not just setting the scene; although many of the scenes also take place in a café. This is actually a cafe, with a handful of other participants, sat in pairs at their respective tables, and a majority of people who are just everyday folks out for a drink or a sandwich.

We were shown to our table and invited to sit. On the table were a collection of objects – glasses of water, a pipette, stage blood, two plastic figurines (one man, one woman), a ball of white tack, some chalk, a book, some notepaper, some blank cards… and a pair of MP3 players with headphones. We were instructed to put on the headphones. Simultaneously, the MP3 players were started.

From there on, we followed the instructions given over the earpieces. My role was that of an older man, a self-described philosopher. Ruth played a prostitute, which lead to at least a little embarrassment on her part when she was required to say, “I am a prostitute,” in a crowded café. It’s easy to feel acutely self-conscious when you’re relaying what you’re told in a pair of headphones out loud. You know that feeling that you get when you realise that you’re singing along to the music you’re listening to, in public? It’s a little bit like that, but instead of music, you’re spouting out-of-context nonsense.

It’s not just dialogue, though; it’s also stage direction, motivation, and prompts to inspire emotion. Some of the story is told in a very abstract way: early on, Ruth’s and my characters had agreed to meet in a house on a hill, near a tree. Ruth laid her hand out on the table, on which she had, under previous instruction, drawn a square and a dot on the heel of her palm. I was told to examine the shape of the “landscape” of her hand, and try drip water from my pipette, from as high as I could reach, onto it. Simultaneously, her character – already in the house (the square) – was told that it had begun to rain, and she heard the sound of a storm beginning through her headphones.

Throughout the course of the event, we each took on a variety of roles: as characters in our own play, as directors of a “play” performed on our table using the props we had to hand, as the audience to both of the above, and even as parts of the scenery.

The story itself… was okay. It felt like it was lacking something. It wasn’t bad, and it certainly took advantage of the space and technology it required, but it was perhaps trying to say a little bit too much in a little bit too short a time. But the medium? That whole “scripted, but you don’t get to read ahead”, headphones-acting? That’s kind-of cool and exciting. I’ve got the urge to try to write something similar myself (perhaps for a cast of five or six). Although first, I’ve got a murder mystery to finish writing!

Update, 5 November 2019: the Playhouse’s link has gone down, but information about the piece is available at the producers’ website.

Equilibre – Theatre For Horse-Lovers And Other Wierdos

Just got back from seeing Equilibre (horse theatre thingy) with Claire. What can I say? Great music, brilliant dancing, some very impressive singing, the second best use of stagecraft (circumstances given) that I’ve ever seen, the work of a director with great imagination, impressive horseplay…

…but I can’t help but feel that I’ve come away from it missing something. Perhaps I just didn’t ‘get it’, but I did find it difficult to follow the plot, or, at times, even find one at all. Perhaps something to do with the fact that, of the four languages used during the show, I understood only the third-most frequently used.

Still: if you like horses, and you’d like to see them trot their stuff alongside opera singers on stilts, gypsies dancing with a horse skull, and flame-flinging people from earlier in my journal, this is the show for you. If, however, you don’t speak either Italian or Romany and don’t like horses, don’t bother.

They’re performing all of this week. Tickets £10 adults, £6 children.

Fucking Flaming Brands

Last night Kit, Claire, Paul, Bryn and I acquired a huge wooden desk and other burnables and went and started an enormous fire on the beach, having just finished a most fantastic curry at Cafe All Spice. Big fire!

Later, we were joined by a man with some juggling batons and a woman with some flags and flaming things on the end of cords. I’d never juggled with clubs before, but a quick play and a little coaching later, and he had me juggling with fucking flaming brands. What a buzz!

The woman will be taking part in Equilibre at Machynlleth. Judging by how impressive she alone was with her firey-things, I’m really tempted to go. Showing 9th-16th August, 8pm.

I must buy some flame-batons. The buzz is only just wearing off.