Illegally, In a Dark Wood

There were only two plays that were ever put on by the secondary school that I attended. They weren't really the kind of things that would be a guaranteed hit with teenage girls, but it was a Girls' Grammar School and everything we did was supposed to be Educational with a capital E.

The two plays were the six-hundred-years-old Mak, the Sheep Stealer and the short opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, which was written by GianCarlo Menotti and became famous on television in the Fifties.

So it was a bit of a coincidence that my friend David decided to put them both on this Christmas. If you're going to put plays on in a wood, a few days before Christmas, you need a large bonfire to keep everyone warm.

I'm not going to tell you where this performance took place. It was in a wood. Somewhere in England. The reason I'm not telling you exactly where, was that Health and Safety said there couldn't be a bonfire in case it got out of control and burned down the whole of England, just like it hasn't done every other year that they've performed there.

They had a bonfire anyway. So there.

In spite of the British weather lots of people came: here are some of them, watching the play:

Some of the audience were given torches to shine on the actors' faces and there were some lights strung up in the trees and the effect was magical.

Sadly for me, as soon as the second play, Amahl and the Night Visitors, began, I remembered it all too clearly. Not this play version, which was great, but the opera, which, I now remembered, I was involved in somehow at school - probably stage-managing, I did a lot of that - and I remembered hating it with a Great Hatred for its worthy-but-dullness. Plot: the Three Kings arrive at naughty young Amahl's house and they stay there for a bit and then Amahl goes with them to see the infant Jesus. It's like a subplot from The Life Of Brian, but - in the opera version at least - with far less comedy.

Still, thank goodness this wasn't the opera version because it was, I remembered, the turgid tediousness of this particular opera which gave me a towering dislike of, and prejudice against, opera - - and that has persisted to this day.

Mak, the Sheep Stealer, on the other hand, I absolutely loved. Thankfully, David had done his own adaptation so it wasn't the dreary version we had at school. I was in it at school, playing some dozy shepherd or other, and I remember there was a lot of clapping in rhythm. "MAK-THE-SHEEP- STEALER!" The school I went to could have made anything dull.

The plot is: Mak steals a sheep: the shepherds come to his house to look for it: he has hidden it in the cradle: the shepherds leave: then oops! they come back to give what they think is a new baby a present: they find the sheep: Mak tries to convince them it's not a sheep but a slightly ugly baby: they don't believe him and toss him in a blanket.

Here's the sheep, pretending to be a baby:

It was very funny, thanks to David's great script, some excellent acting and a superb sheep.

I left everyone singing carols and getting all Christmassy. The bonfire was still burning brightly and, as far as I know, the whole of England is not yet burned to a crisp.