Ask a British person about Nativity plays, and it’s not unlikely that a crustacean will get a mention. Emma Thompson’s barely incredulous discovery that there was, actually, multiple lobster present on the birth of Christ—a scene in Love Actually—is a nod to a few of the more outlandish consequences of twiddling with the Christmas story. But the scene also reflects the cherished place the Nativity play continues to carry in British culture.
With Christmas just weeks away, many a parent is more likely to be setting aside tea towels to adorn the heads of tiny shepherds, if not sewing eight legs on an octopus.
While precise statistics are hard to come back by, polls suggest that Nativity plays remain widespread in schools within the UK. In the years before the pandemic, around 8 in 10 parents reported that their children had taken part in a Nativity play. In 2021, when COVID-19 public health measures were still in place, 81 percent of teachers were still planning to placed on a Nativity play, even when it needed to be online.
In a typical production, young children will enact the story of Christ’s birth, from the angel’s visit to Mary to the arrival of the smart men. While many are easy retellings at school halls, some entail a formidable degree of stage management.
At Mayfield School, a Catholic boarding school for women in Sussex, a convention dating back to the Nineteen Fifties sees Mary and Joseph journey through the village with a donkey. They are turned away on the local pub before arriving at the college’s 14th-century chapel, with an actual baby playing the a part of Jesus.
Rob Barward-Symmons, impact and evaluation manager on the Bible Society, describes Nativities as “fascinating moments within the context of British Christianity … this key moment by which an enormous proportion of the population are usually not only hearing Scripture but embodying it and experiencing it. … We do sort of take it with no consideration.”
For most kids and young people in Britain, he observes, “school is the one place where they’re going to encounter the Bible.” The overwhelming majority of youngsters—around 94 percent—are educated in state-funded schools. For centuries most colleges were run by church authorities, and even today, around a 3rd of England’s state-funded schools are “faith schools,” a majority of that are affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church or Church of England.
Anyone can go to a faith school, although some schools do give priority to children from families which can be regular worshipers. (They’re the minority—75 percent of oldsters of youngsters under 18 go to church rarely or never.) Most of the 1.9 million pupils taught in state-funded faith schools in England won’t attend church outside of faculty.
Even for almost all not attending a faith school, the classroom will likely be the place they encounter religion through lessons on the topic. Technically, all state-funded schools are required by law to supply an act of “collective worship” that’s “broadly Christian” every single day, however the extent to which schools comply varies enormously.
While debate concerning the place of Nativity plays in a multicultural society occasionally arises, they continue to be popular. A 2020 poll found that 78 percent of the population approved of faculties performing them and that around as many had taken part in a Nativity play once they were in school. This is despite the proven fact that lower than two in five of the population discover as Christian.
“They’re a valued rite of passage for folks to share with their children,” Barward-Symmons observes. “This revisiting of this experience that folks have undergone.”
The nostalgia factor is something that has been observed at close hand by Lucinda Murphy, who recently accomplished a PhD exploring Nativity plays. She interviewed 4 parents whose children had recently performed in a Nativity play in a nonfaith primary school in a multicultural area of North West London.
For one nonreligious parent, it was “seeing your kids doing the stuff you probably did whenever you were five” that created a strong sentimental attachment. A Hindu mother who had attended a Church of England school as a toddler was keen for her children to “have the identical memories,” to know the story she had “learned as a child.”
Céline Benoit, a senior teaching fellow at Aston University whose work explores how children encounter religion in primary schools, agrees that there’s a “huge sense of nostalgia that goes with Nativity plays.”
Her research has led her to conclude that Nativity plays in schools are usually not primarily about celebrating Christianity and the birth of Jesus. Rather, she suggests, they illustrate the proven fact that “a certain type of Christianity—a liberal type of Christianity, for those who like—is viewed as entwined with Englishness.”
She connects this to research showing that oldsters often expect schools to show their children about “the fundamentals of Christianity. … In that way, the training gets passed on, and it doesn’t need to occur in the house context.”
Nativity plays are viewed less as a spiritual festival and more as a “cultural performance,” she argues. This isn’t to detract from parents’ attachment: At her own daughter’s school, nine performances were placed on in 2021 to enable as many parents as possible to observe, while obeying COVID-19 health guidelines.
Barward-Symmons agrees that the ubiquity of Nativity plays shouldn’t give rise to overconfidence of their evangelistic potential.
“There is the chance of it being perceived as a toddler’s story corresponding to a fairy story: nice, lovely, and never an area for going into complexities across the Virgin Birth and the depth of the Incarnation,” he observes.
There stays a challenge, he says, to get children to “consider and reflect and take into consideration this story as something that has a deeper truth behind it and isn’t purely a British cultural tradition.” He wonders what number of teachers are encouraging children back to the Bible to read the gospel accounts from which Nativity plays are a “few steps removed.”
Interestingly, a recent national review of spiritual education—a compulsory subject for state-funded schools—suggested that pupils could study the concept of the Incarnation as a part of the Nativity story from the age of 5.
In fact, the Bible Society’s own research with children aged 8 to fifteen contained some encouraging findings. As of 2014, 71 percent recognized that the Nativity story is within the Bible, while 75 percent had read, heard, or seen it. It was by far their favorite Bible story.
At St Mary’s, a Church of England primary school in East Barnet, an area in north London, a conventional Nativity play is performed every 12 months by the youngest children, while older pupils participate in a more contemporary Nativity production. Last 12 months, they placed on Bethlehem Bandits, a musical by Dave Corbett by which a gaggle of bandits fail to steal anything from Mary, Joseph, the smart men, and even the shepherds and judge to vary their ways.
Children arrive at the college with “a lot of different experiences of religion—some with little or no, and a few with lots,” says the headteacher, Maria Constantinou, who goals for each pupil “to determine the power to carry a balanced and well-informed conversation about beliefs and religion, including the Christian faith.”
“As a church school, Nativities are a part of our identity,” she told CT.
“It gives the youngsters a possibility to actually experience the story and empathize with what it might need been like for the holy family. We weave our collective worship theme during Advent into this, to support the youngsters to grasp how the birth of a tiny baby would change the lives of so many individuals. A Nativity helps even the youngest members of our St. Mary’s family to know the story of the primary Christmas and that it is not all about wrapping paper and presents.”
Nativities are “about people and communities as much as they’re concerning the message of God’s love and Christ’s light and hope,” she says.
Many performances involve a component of audience participation, with parents, grandparents, siblings, and members of the local clergy often present. “There is all the time laughter on the puns and terrible jokes (‘We must give these camels a rest before they get the hump’),” she observes, “and a number of tears of pride, especially after we end the infant Nativity with a gorgeous rendition of ‘Away in a Manger.’”
It’s an approach that resembles medieval mystery plays, says Eleanor Parker, lecturer in medieval English literature at Brasenose, a school of Oxford University, who notes that including additional, sometimes comic elements to Nativities is nothing latest.
Medieval dramas telling the Christmas story took a “creative approach” that brought the story to life, she says. “In one play, there’s a comic book storyline by which the shepherds play tricks upon each other. You have a way of those shepherds as people … characters you’ll be able to relate to. … It’s quite moving, then, whenever you see them on the manger, giving their cherries to the child Jesus.”
While St. Francis is usually cited because the originator of the Nativity—he famously used live animals to create the first-ever Nativity scene in Greccio, Italy, in 1223, as a backdrop to his preaching—Parker notes that Nativity plays in schools are a Twentieth-century invention that arose after a reawakening of interest in medieval mystery plays.
Suppressed on the Reformation, religious plays remained “taboo” for hundreds of years, all through the Victorian period, she explains. This shifted within the early many years of the last century, with a more “open-minded” approach to medieval culture that, fairly than dismissing the plays as superstition, recognized them as “full of life, interesting, original ways of telling the story.”
While today’s Nativity plays are performed as standalone productions, within the medieval era, the story would have been part of a bigger cycle of plays telling the story of Christianity from Creation to Judgment Day, often throughout the summer given their outdoor nature. While children can have contributed to the music utilized in productions, Parker thinks it unlikely that they’d have been given the roles they now enjoy in Nativities.
Like Nativity plays, mystery plays were widely accessible, designed to speak Bible stories through visual performance, and appealing to an audience that was “young and old, literate and nonliterate.” While many contained comedic elements, the whole cycle wouldn’t have shied away from the darker elements of the story, including Herod’s persecution, Parker notes.
For Barward-Symmons, the recognition of the fashionable Nativity play represents a foundation for teachers and others to construct upon, to encourage children to ask deeper questions.
“What does it mean for this child born to poor and marginalized parents, who’ve been kicked out of their homeland, who’re ostracized in some ways, to be fully divine, fully human, in the shape of this tiny vulnerable infant?” he says.
“What does it mean for Jesus to be visited by smart men or shepherds? To be hunted by Herod? There is the potential for tapping into this well-known story and going, ‘Have one other look; look deeper; reflect on it more. It’s something , but there’s more to it.’”
