The Twelve Days of Christmas
St. Thomas of Canterbury Church, Garden Quarter, Chester. December 2006.
The Twelve Days Of Christmas was the third major production of Theatre In The Quarter. It was an original piece of community music theatre loosely based on the familiar song and pulling together a range of traditions and narratives. It was devised in such a way as to showcase performers of all ages and experience, ranging from professional actors, local school children, church choristers, cast members from Sweet Sixteen, young people from Bridge Foyer housing project and the members of Jigsaw Music Theatre – Theatre In The Quarter’s ‘sister’ company. This ambitious project, led by a professional production team involved 150 performers and five public performances.
‘In the dark cold days of winter it is good to celebrate the cycles of our lives: that light returns; that there are deaths but there are also births; that things can be overturned, whether they be the ancient rituals of tradition, or the bloodless deaths in the mummers’ plays. Nothing lasts forever: order is disrupted by chaos; chaos gives way to order.
The Lord of Misrule is the incarnation of that principle, and whether in his manifestation he is the beggar king who rules for a day, or whether he overturns the money changers’ tables in the temples, he is the life force bringing sacred chaos to the ordered structures of the world; he is the light by which we see that things can be different. All of this is to be found in the mumming traditions of the twelve days season, in guising, in the fasting and then the feasting….’
Helen Newell, Playwright