Whether you’re a pantomime pro or a nativity novice, there are some things guaranteed to happen during this season of tinsel, donkeys and rousing choruses.
For more than two decades, I’ve either been involved in producing the primary school end-of-term performance or I’ve been responsible for doing the headteacher thank-yous at the end of every star-studded miniature spectacular.
I have seen everything from standing ovations and proud tears to vomiting shepherds – and, once, a wise man who fainted and faceplanted into the audience (thankfully with no injuries apart from the five years taken off his panicked Year 2 teacher’s life).
Show time
There is nothing quite like the end-of-term performance in a primary school. It really is one of the most wonderful times of the year, despite the annual panic over the disappearance of the halos and the last-minute demise of the CD player.
For weeks in advance, preparations will begin with teachers familiarising themselves with this year’s musical take on the festivities. This usually consists of a small group of teachers flicking through a CD after school and determining whether or not they can hit those perilously high notes.
Adding a frisson of tension are the often opposing views. The traditionalists will want to ensure that every hymn, from Once In Royal David’s City to the interminably long Twelve Days of Christmas, is included for everyone from early years foundation stage to Year 6. Others will favour a more modern twist and suggest previously unknown, but funky songs along the lines of Whoops-a-Daisy Angel or The Wriggly Shepherds.
There will then be the lengthy conversation about whether or not to include some interpretive dance involving the choreography of dozens of small children dressed as ribbon-swishing snowflakes or reindeer doing the running man.
Once all of this is decided, weeks are spent with a festive earworm, as you find the much-practised songs stuck in your head (usually at 1am when you’re in a panic about tinsel or the height of the stage step). The tune, though, will elude the actual performers.
This is usually followed by a mad panic that things will never be ready on time, as you envisage having to cancel the entire, faltering debacle and incur the wrath of the disappointed parent body.
What actually happens every year, along with the opening of each advent calendar door, is a gradual yet steady improvement in performance until each camel, angel and king becomes a star in their own right.
You begin to toy with the idea that you might just quit teaching and become a full-time director, such is your apparent talent for choreographing livestock, and ensuring everyone can sing and dance without knocking over the manger. Your now dog-eared script, scrawled with panicked reminders and stage directions, which was never more than three feet away from you on any given day in the build-up, is being referred to less and less. You begin to actually look forward to the performance.
The final countdown
About one week before you go live, one of the major characters will either have a week off school with illness or announce that they won’t be able to perform, as they’re going on holiday and forgot to tell you. This is when you start hyperventilating in the art cupboard and rue the day you agreed to put on the show.
The tickets have already gone out. The programmes with the winning artwork from Year 2 have been photocopied and typed up with all of the children’s names and are stacked, ready to go. Your teaching assistant will talk you down from the ceiling and remind you that you are not putting on a Broadway show. And, actually, a couple of children know everybody’s lines verbatim so they can stand in.
The costume fittings will have happened in a blur of bare feet, smocks, safety pins and stapled cardboard headbands. Others in school are warned not to touch the hallowed clothes rail of miniature outfits, which will hang labelled and ready, cordoned off in some rarely visited corner of the school.
The premises officer will have spent a morning wrangling with the stage and a new hall timetable will be circulated, which means no one can do any indoor PE until the greatest show on earth has completed its run.
Lunch tables will be squeezed around the stage and assemblies are just that bit cosier. Throughout the last few weeks, midday meals are eaten in front of a tableau of Bethlehem’s skyline and a hastily discarded crook.
'Twas the night before the performance
At the traditional dress rehearsal, at least two children will get stage fright and one will spend the entire time waving to their big sister.
There will be a mixture of barely audible whispers and lines shouted with such ferocity that everyone jumps out of their skin.
Then the big night arrives. Visitors will assemble on neatly lined chairs in a hall that is about the same temperature as the surface of the sun. Tinny Christmas music from the replacement CD player sings out, and there's a whiff of mince pies and bare feet.
Staff in jaunty Santa hats will assist the PTA to sell raffle tickets and apologise for the lack of mulled wine.
All of a sudden, a hush will descend and the head will stride to the front and do the statutory warnings about photography and social media. They then introduce the cast with all the excitement of a Saturday-night TV show. The lights will dim, someone will drop a cowbell or trip over a costume hem, and all of a sudden it has begun.
The staff member with the unenviable task of coaxing the CD player into life will be regretting their choice of thick woollen festive jumper, as the temperature continues to rise. But they will not be as hot as their colleague squatted among the children, whose job it is to ensure that everyone gets up and down that stage step without losing a headband or falling into the back end of a donkey.
The class teacher will be knelt at the front of the stage, jabbing and pointing and mouthing words like a cross between a conductor, a choir master and an air-traffic controller. Beside them will be their trusty script, thumbed, scribbled and restapled at least three times.
Stage fright
Despite everyone’s best efforts, at least one person will forget their lines or an entire song will be sung in the wrong key, at the wrong pace, and someone, somewhere will continue singing a verse at top volume once the backing track has stopped.
Mary will invariably sling or drop the Tiny Tears baby Jesus rather unceremoniously into the manger. At least one angel will cry and have to be helped off. One dancer will go the wrong way and at least two characters will enter the stage when they have no business being there, thus throwing the cast into a panic, who look desperately to their kneeling teacher.
But despite all of this, it really is the most wonderful time of the year. I am always glad it's dark during those performances, as every year, whatever the songs, whatever the calibre of performance, I would get a lump in my throat and a sting in my eye.
Whether you’re a fan of carols or songs about wobbly snowmen, it makes you proud to be a part of a school community. It can bring a tear to even the most Scroogelike of eyes.
So here’s to all those performances up and down the country currently in production. May your songs be easily learnt, your myrrh not go missing and your dancing snowflakes all remember to exit stage left.
Emma Turner is the research and CPD lead for Discovery Schools Trust, Leicestershire. She tweets @Emma_Turner75
