TT - 30 Mrs Green's system

To understand Mrs Green's casting system for the Tendringhoe JMI nativity play you will neeed a ruler, a pencil and a blank sheet of paper. Draw two twenty-centimetre lines at right angles to make a graph. On the horizontal axis, subdivide the line into twenty and plot all the parts of the play. Start with the back-end of the donkey, work up through the sheep, the inn-keeper's wife and sundry messangers, then Gabriel and the narrator until you arrive at Mary and Joseph. Now subdivide the vertical axis into twenty and plot the professions of the children's parents according to the Registrar General's Scale. Remember this is a Church of England school so Vicar comes above Doctor. Finally, plot the twenty children in Miss Green's class between these two axes and you should have a nice left to right rising diagonal.

Only this year Mrs Green is running into difficulties at both ends of the scale. According to her system Basil, the son of a university professor and a GP, must be Joseph, but Basil's parents are not like other group 'A' professionals. Last summer, when Eric was away teaching in America, Eleanor took her two children to Glastonbury for their annual holiday. Basil's vivid and fully illustrated account in his News and Story Book of camping in mud, having his face painted, and singing along to Keane on the main stage received a tart 'adequate' from Mrs Green. Not surprisingly, Basil is 'not like other boys' and his disgusting theatricality is hardly something his teacher wants to encourage. Val Green comes up with a clever solution and casts Basil as the black Magus, a part she normally reserves for any child who in her opinion has had 'a slap from the tar-brush' at some point in their genetic history: which in a village like Tendringhoe usually means divining some ancient Spanishy genes in a child with a Welsh surname. It amuses her that the Bridings will be too 'left wing' to complain.

The other problem child is little Rita Magma. Her parents, a clinically depressed single mother with two other children by different fathers and an alocoholic unskilled father who smells, fall so far outside the usual social parameters of the village school that Mrs Green has had to toy with the possibility of inventing an entirely new part just for her. But whilst the role of 'stable door' is perfectly coherent in terms of the Christams narrative even Mrs Green realises that she cannot simply duck-tape a child between two pallettes and leave her standing in the middle of a stage for 40 minutes. Instead she has introduced the equally inanimate role of the Star of Bethlehem. Rita doesn't get to actually sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, she just gets to stand on the side of the stage whilst little Bethany Tidwell of Tidwell Farm Pork Products sings it.

Rita's grandmother says Rita is the 'star' of the show, and then she repeats it in case the sutlety of the pun has been lost: "Rita is the 'STAR' of the show!" Rita is pelased that Granny thinks its lovely and has started to make her a pretty sparkly costume, because Rita understands only too well her place in Tendringhoe JMI's Great Chain of Being: objects, even celestial ones, come below animals come below people come below angels come below Holy Family. Mrs Green's place in the great scheme of things is not yet something that she is able to articulate to herself.

Mrs Green is delighted with the casting of Suzie Carduggan in the lead role. Such a bright and creative child and a pretty little thing, too! She'll make such a sweet little Mary. Suzie, outraged that Basil, by far the best actor in the school, has been relegated to a non-speaking bit-part, has other plans.