Tantrums and tears at school panto

December 2008

by Norman Harper

Early December has arrived more quickly than ever and there are only three shopping weeks or so until Christmas (sorry). This means one thing: the school-show season has returned. You can hardly contain your excitement, isn’t that right? Savour the drama, the tantrums, the tears, the flounces, the surprisingly good voices from seemingly plain packages and the scraiching from others that is heard as various pitches of strangulated cat by all except their doting relatives.

I imagine most of us have been involved in a school show at some point, either on stage, safely behind the scenes or, where it gets really challenging, out in the audience.

My first memory of a school show was a nativity play at primary. I recall my mother coming home and mentioning that one of the other mums had said how proud she was that her son had landed a major role. There was an unspoken tone of disappointment in me that I, meanwhile, was only good enough to stand up in the shadows, dressed in sandals and a cut-down bedsheet and playing a triangle.

The other mother’s pride puzzled me since I knew that her son, like me, was one of the line-up of six shepherd triangle-players. When I mentioned this to him at a dress rehearsal, he explained firmly that while the rest of us had to hit our triangles 24 times, he had to hit his 28. Ergo, the star.

As school life progresses, there arises a need for, shall we say, specialised talents to be shoehorned into pre-Christmas shows to give everyone a shot at local stardom. Consequently, there was one Aberdeenshire secondary school near the coast that famously showcased a dog that could walk on its back legs following its young master, and starred it in every production for six years, ranging from Annie Get Your Gun to Cinderella to West Side Story. Quite how the scriptwriters managed that adaptation is a marvel beyond record.

Sometimes the bigger Hollywood or West End productions have to be scaled down for school-sized stages; hence, Three Brides for Three Brothers or Snow White and the Five Dwarfs.

Hysteria spread among the dwarves

One enterprising Aberdeen academy thought it had solved the perennial school-show Snow White problem of cramming so many burly teenagers dressed as dwarfs on to the stage at the same time as the other leading characters. The musical director borrowed seven children from one of the feeder primary schools to play the dwarfs.

This seemed like a good idea at the time, he told me many years later. He even had three dwarfs on standby in case of last-minute nerves.

Alas, once Dopey had vomited and Sleepy had had a little down-below accident, the hysteria spread until Doc was crying, Happy was transfixed with terror and Bashful, Sneezy and the three understudies were refusing in sympathy with their colleagues.

The only real trouper was Grumpy and he savoured every minute, which explains why the audience that year was treated on the first night to Snow White and the… Dwarf.

A clever school show will adapt the standard text to include some local jokes, which usually go down well, particularly if a few town notables are the gentle butt of the humour and, crucially, can take the joke. The bones of school shows are littered, however, with the burned egos of self-imagined bigwigs whose sense of humour deserted them for a night. Now that Scotland has become more litigious, it’s a wise show director who tones down some of the localised lampooning.

Some schools go as far as to localise everything. I recall serious discussions at Inverurie Academy one year in the early 1970s that the school show might be The Wizard of Oyne, until the idea was shot down by someone more po-faced than usual. I still think it would have been wonderful and long to see it some day. On a similar note, why not An American in Portsoy, Longside Story or Meet Me In St Fergus?

By the time I left school (having played Scrooge along the way and receiving, may I tell you, a crit in the local squeak that admitted that the reviewer had never seen a Scrooge quite like it), I imagined that my school-show days were over.

That was not how it turned out. One of the jobs of a cub reporter was to attend dress rehearsals of major school shows, and I have written before of my embarrassment at sitting in the front row at an Aberdeen secondary, notebook in hand, pen poised, beside assorted casually dressed adults.

That talentless horse

The production was certainly spectacular, but the whole enterprise was being let down by the female lead who sported, as one of my colleagues used to say, a voice like a crackit chunty. The girl also had the theatrical grace of an elephant.

When the man sitting next to me leaned across as the interval curtain fell and asked what I thought, I was still too green to hedge my bets and said, with commendable honesty, I thought: “Well, it’s absolutely marvellous, but where did they drag up that talentless horse playing Maria?” I detected the sudden frost just milliseconds before he said: “I’m the depute rector and that’s my daughter.”

The best critics, though, are those who have not yet learned about embarrassment or to spare finer feelings or massage egos. They are children.

One of our friends was the depute head at a primary school who relished the story from one of her own school’s productions. The auditorium was packed with families eager to see their sons, daughters, grandchildren, nephews and nieces on stage.

At a quiet spell about 20 minutes into proceedings, a little crystal voice rang out across the assembly:

“Mummy, this is just rubbish, isn’t it?”

Norman Harper wishes you a merry Christmas and a new year that brings everything you wish for, including front-row tickets for all school shows.

This is an article from the December 2008 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, subscribe to Leopard Magazine.