sheep

When I was younger, I was quite shy and self-conscious and struggled to express myself in social situations.

As a result, my mum was always on the lookout for activities that I could participate in that would push me out of my comfort zone and help me develop confidence socially.

So when I was in Year 11, she encouraged me to audition for the school play.

The prospect of getting involved in the school play made me quite nervous because, up until that point, my track record in drama hadn’t exactly been great.

My confidence had been dented by an incident that had occurred several years earlier during my primary school nativity when I was playing the part of a sheep.

Compared to the other parts in the nativity, the role of the sheep was relatively straightforward.

I only had one very simple line to deliver.

However, when my moment of glory arrived, the pressure of the audience staring at me caused me to panic and I slipped completely out of character and messed up my lines.

Following this, the teachers no longer trusted me to be able to handle the role of the sheep and, as a result, I was cast as the back-end of the donkey when nativity rolled around the following year.

The role of the donkey’s arse was a non-speaking part, which meant that I didn’t have to worry about messing my lines up, although I did find it hard to get fully immersed in my character and the overall narrative arc of the play.

As a result of my experiences in my school nativities, I didn’t have a lot of confidence when I went to audition for the play in Year 11.

The play that year was Oklahoma which was set in the Southern States of America and I was cast in the role of a generic milk maid.

Like the part of the sheep, the role of the milk maid was pretty simple and only involved saying two or three lines of scene setting dialogue.

However, during rehearsals, the teacher gathered us all around her and told us that, in order to give the audience the most immersive viewing experience possible, we would have to put on our best accents.

This was slightly problematic due to the fact that I couldn’t do a Southern American accent, or any accent at all for that matter. In fact, the only accent that I could do was a stronger version of the accent that I already had.

As a result, our school’s production of Oklahoma featured eight Southern American Maids and then me, the extremely Liverpudlian one.

Btw if you’re not sure what a Liverpool accent sounds like in the middle of *Oklahoma*, imagine that Cilla Black has been transported back in time and is presenting an episode of Blind Date in 19^th century America.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the audience laughed at me when I delivered my lines, something which I interpreted as an affirmation of my inherent comedic talent as opposed to a reaction to my dubious ‘American’ accent.

Following this ‘success’, I decided that I actually quite liked acting so, the following year, I auditioned for the school production of MacBeth and was cast as a witch.

Whilst this was an upgrade from my previous role as a milkmaid, it was still a relatively minor part.

However, at this point, I was beginning to develop a little more confidence in myself and was sick of playing a background characters.

I became convinced that the only reason that I that I wasn’t getting to play starring role was because I was being forced to play two-dimensional supporting characters that didn’t allow me to explore the full range of emotional expression that I was capable of.

I thought that if I fleshed out the character of Witch 2, I would be able to form a better emotional connection with her character and really show off what I could do.

Unfortunately, my teacher didn’t seem as onboard with my attempt to diversify the roles of the witches, especially when it started to interfere with the performances of the other students.

I was never cast in another school play again and my acting career has never quite recovered since!

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When I was in Year 1, I wanted to play the baby Jesus in the school nativity.

However, there were several fundamental problems that impeded this desire.

There was, for example, the slight issue that I looked nothing like a newborn baby boy.

This was due to the fact that I was a five year old girl.

Nevertheless, when the cast list was put up in the assembly hall, I crowded around it along with my fellow classmates, wholeheartedly expecting to see the following words imprinted before me:

As a result, I was somewhat taken aback when I was greeted with:

It was hard not to feel dejected, especially when it was consequentially revealed that a plastic doll from Toys R Us had been cast in the role of Jesus instead.

Nevertheless, I knew that the majority of successful actresses had to play some undesirable parts before they hit the big time and so accepted the decision with reasonable levels of grace and dignity.

However, I was a curly-haired and somewhat introverted child and, over the course of several years, a trend started to emerge with regards to the roles I was given in the nativity each year:

After my fourth consecutive outing as a sheep, my mum tried to console me in an attempt to reinstate my damaged sense of self-worth.

Despite her efforts, I became increasingly bitter and began making subtle attempts to sabotage the play.

My subversive actions evidently had an impact.

In 2003, I was finally cast in a different role:

At the time, the opportunity to play the backside of a donkey seemed momentous.

The fact that I had been upgraded to a slightly larger barnyard animal seemed like a significant step in my acting career.

However, like most humans under the age of ten, I was not particularly patient as a child.

This lack of patience was particularly evident during the Christmas period.

When my mum first decided to have children, I imagine that some deluded part of her envisioned the family Christmas as a refined and civilised affair, like it was in Downton Abbey times.

However, the building excitement of the festive season severely compromised my ability to do things at the appropriate time.

This tendency began to manifest itself right at the beginning of December when my mum would hand me an advent calender.

The proper use of an advent calendar relies heavily upon the idea of self-control, a notion which my 8-year-old mind struggled to apprehend at most times of the year.

During the Christmas period, it was a concept that no longer existed on my personal cognitive spectrum.

Halfway through December, my mum would buy a Christmas tree and me and my brother were allowed to decorate it.

The process would start off relatively placidly with each of us placing decorations carefully on the branches.

However, it was not long before it became apparent that there was a significant discrepancy in each of our individual creative visions.

The situation rapidly began to deteriorate.

What had started off as a nice sibling bonding session soon became a savage competition as to who could place the most decorations on the tree in the shortest period of time.

It was not long before we exhausted our mum’s supply of relevant, Christmas-based decorations.

In desperation, we began throwing any item in the immediate vicinity onto the tree in what I can only guess was a crazed attempt to claim it as our territory.

In the end, our tree had a slightly different aesthetic than that which is usually adopted in most other households.