In the bleak midwinter
Nativity plays occupy a vexed place in Britain’s national psyche

Rather like horror movies, nativities have reflected Britons’ fears

Books, arts and culture

AS BRITONS PREPARE for the first December general election since 1923, some of the difficulties of a winter poll are clear: freezing temperatures, blasting gales and rumours of snow. One problem with the chosen date was more unexpected. Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, wrote a letter to local authorities requesting that schools should not be closed and used as polling stations if it meant they would be forced to cancel their Christmas nativity plays. The Association of Electoral Administrators criticised this “unhelpful” intervention, which they said would make the “time-consuming and difficult” process of negotiating access to polling venues even more arduous. Besides, in a few constituencies, the local school was the only suitable location.

Mr Williamson’s determination that the show must go on is less surprising than it might appear, given the cultural importance of nativity plays in Western culture. Almost all adults in Britain have memories of performing in their school’s dramatic retelling of the Christmas story, be they treasured or traumatic. Philip Hodson, a psychotherapist, has claimed that the sense of being “dis-preferred and anonymous” that arises from being cast as a lowly shepherd can haunt individuals well into adulthood. This year, a survey claimed a correlation between a child’s role in a nativity and their future earnings. (The average Mary can expect an annual income of £39,000, or $51,300, but a lamb must settle for a more modest £20,000.) The story’s virality confirmed the vexed significance of the nativity play in Britain’s national psyche.

The possible disruption to this year’s plays touched a nerve at a time when many Britons are fed up with the absurdities of national politics. But although this particular gripe is new, religious and political anxieties have been reflected in nativity plays from the beginning. St Francis of Assisi’s performance of midnight mass with a scenic backdrop in 1223 is often cited as the first nativity, but the historical roots of the form go through English medieval play cycles, to pre-Christian rituals.

The first nativities that would be recognisable as such today, performed in churches in the early 13th century, were beset by anxiety about whether the Latin dialogue should be translated into the vernacular. Use of Latin upheld the church’s prestige and mystique, but English versions were beloved by the largely illiterate population, and so were grudgingly tolerated.

As vernacular nativities grew in popularity, they became more elaborate and expanded to include more elements of the Christmas story. One medieval nativity depicted King Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents, featuring a procession of singing choir boys who carried a lamb through the church before being realistically beaten up. All this was too much for the religious authorities, who by the 1400s had designated such plays as ludi inhonesti (“naughty plays”), kicking them out of the church and into the streets and marketplaces, where their wild popularity and dramatic experimentalism only grew.

The tensions over the translation and content of the nativity lay at the heart of the religious disquiet which would later erupt in the Reformation. After it, in the 17th century, the subversive rowdiness of the plays made them a target of Oliver Cromwell’s efforts to purify the nation of its dissolute indulgences (which included most Christmas celebrations). The plays returned after the restoration of the monarchy, and continued in raucous fashion until Victorian moral strictures turned them from unruly booze-ups to the meek and mild performances by schoolchildren with which Britons are now familiar.

Today, few people worry that nativities are no longer staged in Latin, or that they pervert the moral character of their participants. But the nativity stage is still a site of religious and political conflict. In the 2000s there was outrage over teachers secularising Christmas performances, supposedly in the name of excessive political correctness. The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, accused such “illiberal atheists” of “throwing out the crib at Christmas” by leaving Jesus out of the plays. More recently, these concerns about the religious character of the nation have taken on a specifically anti-Muslim inflection. In 2008 right-wing newspapers made much of a story about a school “cancelling” the nativity to make way for Eid (in fact, the performance was only postponed).

As well as the polling station closures, this year a separate furore has revolved around whether parents should be banned from sharing pictures of the plays on social media. Like horror movies, nativity controversies track deep fears, so it is hardly surprising that online privacy is the next brewing row.

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