GATTON
COMMUNITY
THEATRE
Production Artwork
Anna Thompson
Artistic Director
The Twelve Days of Christmas
December 2007
GCT staged an energetic piece of new theatre, The Twelve Days of Christmas, during December 2007.
This interpretation of the well-known Christmas song told a contemporary story of a group of people with a sense of faith, purpose and commitment as they prepared for a community project - a Christmas Pageant being held in the town square between Christmas and Epiphany. Using images from the traditional rhyme as the basis for the different groups of people one might expect to find in a village community, characters included, among others, the Five Gold Rings - an ageing rock band without a drummer; Eleven Pipers Piping - a discordant children's recorder group struggling to cope with a well known Christmas carol; Eight Maids A' Milking - the women's catering committee each striving to outdo each other, and Ten Lords A' Leaping - a group of streetwise teenagers with attitude who hang about the village square. Watching them all was the symbolic figure of the Partridge In A Pear Tree - Old Tom, a homeless elderly man rejected by most of society. PATH, a local gospel choir, provided the musical interludes.
The play was devised entirely by the cast, initially during a period of workshops and continuing after casting through rehearsals. The final script was written by artistic director Anna Thompson.
Using people from the Merstham community as the centre core, members of the 60-strong cast came from all parts of the local area - from Banstead to Horley and Caterham to Dorking and, in keeping with Gatton Community Theatre’s policy of involvement for all, the youngest performers were aged 7 and the oldest was 85.
The production was staged in an unusual interior theatre space especially built for this production. A traverse stage was erected in a space created inside a purpose-built black box constructed by a professional technical crew within the Royal Alexandra & Albert School chapel at Gatton Park, Reigate.
Photographs courtesy of Will Dartnall, Paul Seldon and Malcolm Brenchley