Having just survived the festivities, we all have had time to ponder the question: What would life be like if it was Christmas every day?
An answer is provided by Anthony Neilson, bad-boy author of such adult plays as Penetrator, The Censor and The Wonderful World of Dissocia. This time, his Get Santa! is suitable for kids and is something of a delightful surprise.
Poor Holly. It’s Christmas and this spunky 10-year-old doesn’t need any presents: all she wants Santa to do is to find her real dad. The situation is not uncommon: Holly lives with her mum Barbara and with Bernard, her step-dad. For Christmas, Gran is visiting to help out. With unimpeachable logic, Holly reasons thus: Santa visits every house in the world, therefore he must know where Terry, her real dad, lives. If she sets a trap for Santa, she will be able to get in touch with Terry.
It’s a cunning plan, but things go wrong very soon after the global gift-giver arrives. Without giving any of the pleasurable plot twists away, it can be said that Santa’s son and helper, young Bumblehole, is involved in some farcical goings-on and that some magical sleights of hand result in Holly’s Teddy being reanimated – and the talking teddy is one of the stars of the show.
Neilson loves setting his plays at Yuletide – no fewer than four of his back catalogue have been set during this time. Clearly, there is something about the mix of innocence and ghastliness that appeals about the so-called festive season. As with all of his best recent work, Neilson is good at taking the kaleidoscope of everyday life, giving it a good shaking and then stamping on it until the stage is littered with the mess of surreal ideas, childlike reasoning and sublime silliness. Such fun!
This time the story deftly mixes small doses of pain – Holly’s loneliness and her longing for her real dad – with great splashes of humour. Here, fart jokes alternate with magical enchantment, and warm desires heat up the chilly depths of young depression. This Christmas is a kind of Jungian therapy session, one in which the joys of song and laughter soothe the aching soul. The agony of separation is overcome by the wild wanderings of a vivid imagination.
You can’t fault the politics of the show. It proclaims an admirable scepticism about Santa as a grumbling worker and demonstrates that repeating Christmas more than once a year would be a tedious and brain-curdling experience. Both kids and adults will find the show enjoyable because the acting is big and breezy, the set is lurid and sparkles with explosive effects, and the story moves forward at a cracking pace.
Amid all the jokes, the serious points arrive almost surreptitiously, teaching us some valuable lessons about selfishness and self-knowledge, about the relentless pressure to have fun at the year’s end, while somewhere in a corner there also lurk some truthful musings about mothers and daughters, and about young girls and their fathers.
Neilson’s production stars Imogen Doel, making her professional stage debut, as the feisty and hilarious Holly, a nice contrast to Gabriel Quigley as the confused Barbara and Amanda Hadingue as the scatty Gran. Likewise, David Sterne’s grizzled Santa contrasts perfectly with both Tom Godwin’s comic Bumblehole and Robert Stokes’s dog-like Bernard. The cartoonish feel of the performances feels just right. You’d have to have a cold heart not to love this comic Christmas.
