Review of Scene 12
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By Our Man About to go on Holiday, Steve Tomkins

"My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky", said Wordsworth. I can take 'em or leave em to be honest, but I know the feeling – it's the one you get when you see that the twelfth instalment of the Ship of Fools Nativity Play is only three pages long, weighing in at about half the average length to date.

With the benefit of hindsight and bilious critical ennui, it was perhaps a mistake to have an entire scene for all the miscellaneous characters who haven't been integral to the action to come to the stable and step into the limelight to pay their respects, as all the miscellaneous characters who haven't been integral to the action have spent the entire play so far onstage jostling for the spotlight and trying to join in. The only ones we haven't already seen enough of are all the essential characters who are integral to the action but never turned up.

Personally, though, I think you can't have too much of Mary, and if she's had more soliloquies in this play than Hamlet, that's OK with me.

In tonight's instalment, she gets some quiet to channel her utter girliness into giving the stable a makeover. And it was nice to see Babushka making an unscheduled appearance to help with the curtains. Christmas dames have to stick together.

"It's just that, well, I haven't got a gift to give, and, well, I can sew," she says. Very much entering into the Christmas spirit and everything, and maybe I'm just cynical, but gold, frankincense, myrrh and curtains? I'm not sure.

Meanwhile Jesus' Evil Twin goes on her first shop(lift)ing spree with her Fairy Godmother, bringing back Jesus a WWID bracelet. A number of actors absentmindedly wandered onstage out of character, an utterly understandable mishap that I think it would be wrong to make too much of.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Sheep takes a keen interest in the cigars the magi brought Jesus, but after a warning from Mary eats them instead.

And Mary has a think about whether to get the Christchild christened, a theological conundrum which I'm sure will give us all something to think about this Christmas.

© Ship of Fools 2002