The bar was set high last year for festive comedy at BAC by Daniel Kitson’s A Show for Christmas, which is now playing in New York. Sara Pascoe’s effort – as unlike Kitson’s as could be – is a faux school nativity play, replacing the Bible story with a cheerfully crude mashup of myths and world theologies. A send-up of amateurism that is itself happy to be amateurish, this pan-religious Play Wot I Wrote is sometimes inexpert, sometimes throwaway. But it’s also endearingly silly, big-hearted, and as well stocked with incongruous goodies as the variety pack stuffed into your Christmas stocking.
Pascoe is supported on stage by a grotto’s-worth of Santa’s helpers, in the form of the British Humanist Choir (singing “Oh come let us adore her” as she arrives on stage), members of BAC’s Homegrown young people’s theatre and the comedian John Robins, among others. Robins plays Oedipus, whose story substitutes for Jesus’s in this attempt to unite all creeds in one daft, multicultural tale. Also starring are Sigmund Freud (who drowns in the sinking of Noah’s ark), the Little Match Girl (whose story – gruesomely reworked – makes Pascoe giggle uncontrollably) and, instead of the three wise men, Ganesh, Odin and Princess Diana.
Interspersed are carols by the choir, drolly rewritten from a secular standpoint, and standup bits from Pascoe – whose signature winsome style fits seamlessly into the school-play conceit. Her arch, feminist voice, meanwhile, is shot through the script: “and I hardly had any obstetric tearing,” deadpans Jocasta after Oedipus’s virgin birth. Ramshackle as it is, there’s transparent pleasure in the enterprise. With its jaunty progressive politics, sceptical but uncynical approach to faith, and fine gags (“but none of these,” says Moses of his 10 commandments, “are set in stone”), Pascoe’s neo-nativity has at least as much to recommend it as the real thing.
- At Battersea Arts Centre, London, until 23 December. Box office: 020-7223 2223.
