Many schools of our acquaintance produce and perform a Christmas musical. But we, of course, are different. We stage ours at spring midterm, not through any great feat of pre-planning, but due to a combination of indolence and confusion.
We set out in October each year upon that magical mystery tour that is the Christmas show but, by the end of November, we are so far behind with preparation and rehearsal that we have to rejig our schedules in the most frenzied fashion.
Thus this year The Bethlehem Story somehow transmuted, transmogrified and transformed over the months to become, miraculously, Noah's Great Lifeboat. The change wasn't nearly as awesome as might first appear.
For starters, the players were exactly the same: 102 starlets. The costumes did not vary either - very few in this part of the world could readily distinguish between what was de rigeur dress at the time of Christ and what passed for dead cool some 12 centuries earlier. The set posed no querulous problems either; desert, donkeys and sorghum grass are now as ever have been, world without end.
The staffroom, for weeks beforehand, ceased to be a place of rest and repose. It takes on an altered state, with scissors snipping furiously at card and cloth, while animated debate takes place about who should be upstage of whom, and what, and when will so-and-so stop fluffing his lines, and is it too late to dump him back into the hapless chorus?
The Staffroom Wag does not really help much either: "It'll be all plight on the night," he drones into his Bovril, not realising just how close he is to total immersion with the wailing sinners who fail to get their boarding passes on to the Ark in Act One.
The First Night arrives. A queue of parents, siblings, grandparents and groupies shuffle along in the February frost. Inside is bedlam, with dashing bodies whizzing hither and yon, all seemingly bedecked in a riot of teatowels. The music begins . . . a hush descends.
Noah, Mrs Noah, Ham, Shem and Japeth and their wives bustle out on to the stage. The songs are belted out, each one greeted by an even more ringing applause. The Ark is built . . . it keeps collapsing, until the principal is seen slinking out to support the offending beam with his own shoes! The flood comes, the thunders roar, the lightning flashes till . . . "at last, at last, the great storm is past", the chorus triumphantly rings out. "The hand of the Almighty God has intervened at last." And it's over. Well, it would be if we had not got another two nights of it.
When we finish fiddling with the cranky keys of the hall's locks, we rush to the pub, in time-honoured thespian tradition, and we even find ourselves hugging each other in sheer relief. What can I say? You were all simply wonderful . . . old hearts!
