A raucous and often slightly surreal celebration of everyone’s first brush with the theatre – the school Nativity play.
Celia Whibley is a young teacher directing class 3C of Verruca Street Primary School in a Nativity play and though the children are unprepossessing and uncooperative, they are the least of Celia’s troubles – her real obstacle is the unhelpful staff, who have been encouraged not to help her by two older teachers who always used to be asked to produce the play and are exacting their revenge. Battling against the odds is a ‘learning experience’ for poor Celia. Will the struggle have been worth it?
Among the vivid adult characters in the play are: Octavia, the headmistress, whose keenness to develop Celia as a teacher blinds her to the machinations of the other staff; Miss Belcher and Miss Cusp, the ‘baddies’, and the hapless Celia herself, who narrates the story as she tries to shape the Nativity into a show worth watching. Among the children we meet Jessica, precocious stage school starlet; Dougal, child genius and walking thesaurus and Shane, would-be ‘bad boy’ with a heart of gold. Seven-year-olds, teachers and parents alike are played by adults in this energetic and warm-hearted comedy.
